The Journal of Brief Ideas

By Falk Reckling

Problem: There is an ongoing debate on the share of OAJ and OAA charging APC from authors. It has been shown that 67% of OAJ listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) work without APC ([Suber 2015] (https://plus.google.com/+PeterSuber/posts/Cqv4oq3LuFr)) and costs get subsidised by other resources. But it is still unclear what the actual share of OAA in OAJ with and without APC is ([Crotty 2015] (http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2015/08/26/do-most-oa-journals-not-charge-an-apc-sort-of-it-depends/)).

Data: We analysed this question for OAA published via FWF funded projects from 1/2013 to 8/2015. The sample includes 730 pure OAA published in 224 OAJ (Hybrid OAA are excluded).

Results: 83.0% (186) of the OAJ charge APC, while 17.0% (38) of the OAJ don’t. On the article level, 93.6% (683) of the articles were published with and 6.4% (47) without APC. This is driven by the fact that 84.9% (620) of all articles are published in journals from just 15 publishers charging APC by default.

The average APC per article in 2014 was € 1.282 ([Rieck/Reckling 2015] (http://figshare.com/articles/Austrian_Science_Fund_FWF_Publication_Cost_Data_2014/1378610)).

Discussion: This result points to the assumption that the usage of OAJ with APC and the share of OAA with APC is worldwide much higher than expected so far.

Acknowledgements: Thanks for support to Martina Kunzmann, Sasa Meischke-Ilic, Ralph Reimann and Katharina Rieck.

Attachment: FWF_OA_articles_1_2013-8_2015.zip (91.2 KB)