Article processing charge

[6] An article processing charge does not guarantee that the author retains copyright to the work, or that it will be made available under a Creative Commons license.

[10] APC fees applied to academic research are usually expensive, effectively limiting open access publishing to wealthier institutions, scholars, and students.

The global average per-journal APC is US$1,626, its recent increase indicating "that authors choose to publish in more expensive journals".

[12] A 2019 analysis has shown 75% of European spending on scientific journals goes to "big five" publishers (Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley, Taylor & Francis and the American Chemical Society (ACS)).

Article processing charges shift the burden of payment from readers to authors (or their funders), which creates a new set of concerns.

[29] A 2017 study by the Max Planck Society estimates the annual turnovers of academic publishers amount to approximately €7.6 billion.

For example, a Guardian article informed that in 2010, Elsevier's scientific publishing arm reported profits of £724m on just over £2bn in revenue.

[33] Under the traditional model, the prohibitive costs of some non-open access journal subscriptions already place a heavy burden on the research community.

[35] For these reasons, some funding bodies simply will not pay the extra fees for open access publishing: the European Union scientific research initiative Horizon Europe does not cover the APCs for articles in hybrid open-access journals.

[39] However, the percentage of diamond OA articles covered in Scopus and Web of Science for the same year was below 1%, suggesting that "Scopus- or Web of Science-based (data) are skewed towards toll access and article processing charges-based publishing, as Diamond journals are underrepresented in (these databases)".