Oliver Budzinski, Thomas Grebel, Jens Wolling and Xijie Zhang (all TU Ilmenau) have published a discussion paper on the topic: Drivers of Article Processing Charges in Open Access.
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. This study sheds light on the various determinants of article process charges (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, the authors employ ANOVA and multivariate regressions to analyze the effects of publisher market power, inter alia, through market concentration, market position of individual publishers (publisher size), and the choice of hybrid publishing model.
This research of authors from the Institute of Economics and from the Institute of Media and Communication Science was funded by the internal research initiative of the Department of Economic Sciences and Media.
