Change and growth in open access journal publishing and charging trends 2011–2021
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This study examines trends in open access article processing charges (APCs) from 2011 to 2021, building on a 2011 study by Solomon and Björk. Two methods are employed, a modified replica and a status update of the 2011 journals. Data are drawn from multiple sources and datasets are available as open data. Most journals do not charge APCs; this has not changed. The global average per‐journal APC increased slightly, from 906 to 958 USD, while the per‐article average increased from 904 to 1,626 USD, indicating that authors choose to publish in more expensive journals. Publisher size, type, impact metrics and subject affect charging tendencies, average APC, and pricing trends. Half the journals from the 2011 sample are no longer listed in DOAJ in 2021, due to ceased publication or publisher de‐listing. Conclusions include a caution about the potential of the APC model to increase costs beyond inflation. The university sector may be the most promising approach to economically sustainable no‐fee OA journals. Universities publish many OA journals, nearly half of OA articles, tend not to charge APCs and when APCs are charged, the prices are very low on average.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.063 | 0.046 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.046 | 0.066 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.029 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it