Drivers of article processing charges in open access

Oliver Budzinski, Thomas Grebel, Jens Wolling and Xijie Zhang

No 133, Ilmenau Economics Discussion Papers from Ilmenau University of Technology, Institute of Economics

Abstract: Large publishing companies have been dominating scientific publishing for long, which leads to high subscription fees and inhibited access to scientific knowledge. At digital era, the opportunity of an unrestricted access appears feasible, because the cost of publishing should be low. It is no longer the readers and libraries to pay subscription fees, but scientific organizations and authors themselves who pay for the cost of having their article published. As the data shows, there is a tremendous variance of article processing charges (APC) across journals, which obviously cannot be explained by the costs. One of the explanatory variables could be reputation, but it only contributes less than 5% to the variance in APC. This study is meant to shed light on the various determinants of APC. Based on data from the OpenAPC Initiative, the Directory of Open Access Journals, the Journal Impact Factor and the Essential Science Indicators of Web of Science, we employ ANOVA and multivariate regressions. The results show that market power plays an important role to explain APCs, inter alia, through market concentration, market position of individual publishers (publisher size), and the choice of hybrid publishing model.

Keywords: open access; article processing charges; market power; market concentration (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D22 D40 D43 L11 L13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-com and nep-sog
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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Journal Article: Drivers of article processing charges in open access (2020)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:tuiedp:133

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