MDC Berlin joins OpenAPC!

The Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine (MDC) has joined openapc.github.io and is sharing its expenditures for publications in both Open Access and toll-access journals.

Contact person is Dr.Dorothea Busjahn.

Cost data

Open Access

The data set covers publication fees for 23 Open Access journal articles paid in 2014. Total expenditure was 41 464€ and the average fee paid 1 220€.

Hybrid

In many toll-access journals some of the articles are open access after a fee has been paid. This model is often called “hybrid open access”. The dataset covers 11 hybrid open access articles. Total expenditure amounts to 20 054€. Average fee is 1 823.1€ and the median 1 382€.

Fees paid per publisher

Average costs per year

Average costs per publisher

Max Planck Digital Library calls for transition to Gold Open Access

In a recent White Paper, Max Planck Digital Library discusses scenarios under which libraries can support the transition of journals from toll-access to Open Access. The study considers mean APCs paid and relates those figures to subscription costs and the number of journal articles published on a country and institutional level. The authors conclude that a move from subscription to open access journal publishing is possible without added expense.

OpenAPC is one of the datasets, which the study refers to:

For instance, we at the Max Planck Digital Library have begun to upload our APC data to a workspace on GitHub, provided by the OpenAPC initiative under the guidance of Bielefeld University. So far we have documented over 1,046 of our APC invoices; the total spend (including taxes) of some EUR 1.3 million results in an average APC value of EUR 1,258 for the Max Planck Society. Similar values are also reported by several of the German universities that are being supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG) to build up their own publication funds. They upload their APC data to the same system, bringing the total record to 2,387 articles, with a total expenditure of almost EUR 3 million and an average APC fee of EUR 1,239.6

The following figure shows the APC breakdown by university and research society.

OpenAPC continuously adds new APC datasets. The present dataset covers 2,926 articles. Total expenditure amounts to 3 585 184€ and the average fee is 1 225€.

University Library of Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München updates BioMed Central expenditures

The University Library of Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München has updated its dataset about author fees paid for publishing in BioMed Central journals.

BioMed Central is part of Springer Science + Business Media.

Contact person is Andrea Dorner

Cost data

The dataset covers publication fees for 305 articles published in Springer journals by LMU Munich researchers, which the University Library managed between 2008 and 2014. Total expenditure amounts to 370 007€ and the average fee is 1 213€.

Average costs per year (in EURO)

The following table shows the distribution over BioMed Central journal titles.