Estimating global article processing charges paid to six publishers for open access between 2019 and 2023

TL;DR

This paper estimates the global expenditure on article processing charges (APCs) for open access publishing from 2019 to 2023, revealing a tripling of costs and highlighting the need for greater transparency in scholarly publishing.

Contribution

It introduces a novel method combining open datasets and APC list prices to estimate global APC expenditure, addressing transparency issues in open access publishing.

Findings

Total APC expenditure between 2019-2023 is approximately $8.35 billion.

Annual spending increased nearly threefold from 2019 to 2023.

Hybrid APCs are higher than gold APCs, with major publishers generating most revenue.

Abstract

This study presents estimates of the global expenditure on article processing charges (APCs) paid to six publishers for open access between 2019 and 2023. APCs are fees charged for publishing in some fully open access journals (gold) and in subscription journals to make individual articles open access (hybrid). There is currently no way to systematically track institutional, national or global expenses for open access publishing due to a lack of transparency in APC prices, what articles they are paid for, or who pays them. We therefore curated and used an open dataset of annual APC list prices from Elsevier, Frontiers, MDPI, PLOS, Springer Nature, and Wiley in combination with the number of open access articles from these publishers indexed by OpenAlex to estimate that, globally, a total of \$8.349 billion (\$8.968 billion in 2023 US dollars) were spent on APCs between 2019 and 2023. We estimate that in 2023 MDPI (\$681.6 million), Elsevier (\$582.8 million) and Springer Nature (\$546.6) generated the most revenue with APCs. After adjusting for inflation, we also show that annual spending almost tripled from \$910.3 million in 2019 to \$2.538 billion in 2023, that hybrid exceed gold fees, and that the median APCs paid are higher than the median listed fees for both gold and hybrid. Our approach addresses major limitations in previous efforts to estimate APCs paid and offers much needed insight into an otherwise opaque aspect of the business of scholarly publishing. We call upon publishers to be more transparent about OA fees.