€493,935 in APC (Article Processing Charges) were paid by researchers in 2023, according to an analysis carried out as part of the monitoring of the Wallonia-Brussels Federation's Open Access decree at ULiège.
€493,935 for 215 items, or €2,297 per article
This represents an increase of 12.8% compared to 2022, when the total amount was €437,886 for 246 articles (€1,780 per article). This colossal increase shows the alarming progression of the “Unfair Gold” model in the Open Access publishing landscape. As a reminder, “Unfair Gold” consists in publishers charging researchers exorbitant fees to publish in Open Access.
This model is favored by the giants of scientific publishing, who represent the top 5 APC amounts paid by the institution in 2023:
- MDPI: €160,464 for 75 articles.
- Frontiers: €76,484 for 27 articles.
- Springer Nature: €75,428 for 25 articles.
- Elsevier BV: €60,613 for 25 articles.
- Wiley-Blackwell: €24,894 for 9 articles.
These 5 publishers alone account for 80.55% of the total amount paid by the institution. The remaining 20.45% is shared among the 34 remaining publishers.
It should also be noted that Springer Nature, Elsevier BV and Wiley-Blackwell are 3 of the 6 publishers targeted by an antitrust complaint in the District Court of New York for anti-competitive practices.
The hybrid model: researchers pay to publish, institutions pay to subscribe
Sadly, 16% of the APC was allocated to the publication of articles in hybrid journals, for a total of €79,225.
As a reminder, the hybrid model favors publishers, who benefit from a double gain. This model requires authors to pay (often very) high APCs to make their articles available in Open Access, and also requires institutions to pay a very high subscription fee to access all the publisher's publications. These are colossal sums of money lost for scientific research.
The average cost per article published in a hybrid journal, as well as the total amount of APC paid by ULiège researchers for articles in hybrid journals, have both risen considerably compared to 2022. The titans of the scientific publishing industry continue to multiply their profits by combining exorbitant APC amounts with ever-increasing subscription prices.
What can you do?
Publish in Open Access without paying APC :
- Deposit an Open Access version of your articles on ORBi (Open repository and bibliography of the University of Liège), as required by the Wallonia-Brussels Federation.
- Publish in an Open Access and peer-reviewed journal listed in the DOAJ portal. More than 66% of the journals referenced there, i.e. 13,781 titles, require no APC from authors.
- Publish on one of the two institutional Open Access publication portals developed by ULiège Library:
If you have to pay APC, avoid the pitfalls
Avoid Unfair Gold and, even more so, the hybrid model.
- Stick to “Fair Gold” Open Access publications: fees charged must not exceed €750, the maximum amount granted by the F.R.S.-FNRS for this type of publication. This will prevent large publishing houses from extorting excessive amounts from researchers, to the detriment of research.
- Boycott the hybrid model: like “Unfair gold”, this model enables the giants of scientific publishing to get even richer by dangling the benefits of Open Access in front of researchers, but at far too high a cost, while maintaining a subscription-based formula that institutions are obliged to pay for access to all their content.