Libraries at University of Nebraska-Lincoln

 

Date of this Version

1-2021

Document Type

Article

Citation

Grossmann A and Brembs B. Current market rates for scholarly publishing services [version 1; peer review: awaiting peer review] F1000Research 2021, 10:20 https://doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.27468.1

Comments

[version 1; peer review: awaiting peer review]

Copyright: © 2021 Grossmann A and Brembs B. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License

Abstract

For decades, the supra-inflation increase of subscription prices for scholarly journals has concerned scholarly institutions. After years of fruitless efforts to solve this “serials crisis”, open access has been proposed as the latest potential solution. However, the prices for open access publishing are also high and are rising well beyond inflation. What has been missing from the public discussion so far is a quantitative approach to determine the actual costs of efficiently publishing a scholarly article using state-of-the-art technologies, such that informed decisions can be made as to appropriate price levels. Here we provide a granular, step-by-step calculation of the costs associated with publishing primary research articles, from submission, through peer-review, to publication, indexing and archiving. We find that these costs range from less than US$200 per article in modern, large-scale publishing platforms using post-publication peer-review, to about US$1,000 per article in prestigious journals with rejection rates exceeding 90%. The publication costs for a representative scholarly article today come to lie at around US$400. We discuss the additional non-publication items that make up the difference between publication costs and final price.

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