A Plea for Fairer Sharing of the True Costs of Publication

Under open access (OA), the public has immediate access to scholarly output free of charge. In the case of author-pays Gold OA, publishers charge scholars at acceptance for publishing the results of their research. Gold OA turns the traditional library subscription business model by 180 degrees, from a consumer-paid to a supplier-paid model. Funding agencies, governments, universities, and the publishing industry are exploring ways to change scholarly publishing to OA; for example, Plan S “requires that, from 2021, scientific publications that result from research funded by public grants must be published in compliant Open Access journals or platforms”. The costs paid by authors under OA are called article processing charges (APCs). These APCs vary widely across journals, which cannot only be explained by variation in actual costs; market power plays a role there as well. However, the term processing charge is somewhat misleading, as authors who submit a paper that gets rejected in whatever phase of the process do not have to pay. In other words, rejected articles do not contribute to covering their processing costs. The current pricing model is analogous to a university invoicing all graduating students for both the costs of their study program and the tuition fees of their peers who dropped out along the way. That hypothetical situationwould strikemost as unfair, and we would like to argue here that the current APC model is equally unfair.

rejected in whatever phase of the process do not have to pay. In other words, rejected articles do not contribute to covering their processing costs. The current pricing model is analogous to a university invoicing all graduating students for both the costs of their study program and the tuition fees of their peers who dropped out along the way.
That hypothetical situation would strike most as unfair, and we would like to argue here that the current APC model is equally unfair.

The Current APC Model
What is processing in this context? The publishing process can be broken down into three stages a paper can go through: 1. it starts with the submission and desk review; 2. (in case of a positive outcome) peer reviews; and 3. (if peer review was also successful, potentially after revision) further editing and publication.
Each of the stages involves editorial office staff salaries and overheads, as well as costs associated with the technologies and systems employed. There are also other costs involved for the publisher (see Van Noorden 3 ). These costs, of course, need to be covered as well, but for reasons of clarity and simplicity, we do not specify them here.

Many discussions have already taken place about how
APCs might lead to increased pressure on editors to accept lower quality articles to improve profits. We want to propose an alternative to the current application of APCs that benefits everyone in the scholarly publishing chain.
A high proportion of drafted manuscripts are never published and will drop out somewhere in the publishing process (e.g., only 39% of observational studies with safety outcome[s] registered on ClinicalTrials.gov were published at least 30 months after the study completion 4 ). Research by Michael Kovanis and colleagues 5 indicated that 15% of publications result from the first submission, 47% from the second submission, and 20% from the third submission. Many authors are using (or abusing?) the peer-review system repeatedly without paying for any of the associated processing costs. For now, most of these costs are paid by journal subscribers, but in an OA world, the costs would be covered by authors who do successfully publish in a given journal. This arrangement penalizes authors who carefully choose where to submit their work while benefitting those who employ a more scattershot approach. Authors may even be advised to use journal peer review in place of soliciting feedback from colleagues or carefully crafting the manuscript prior to submission. 6

A Better APC Model
If we look at the added value of the work done by the publisher in each phase of the publishing process, we see ways to distribute the publishing costs more fairly.
One approach is to split the APC into a submission and a publication fee, 7-10 which addresses the unfairness of charging authors of published articles for the costs generated by rejected manuscripts. Here, we propose a further disentangling of these costs by adding a peer-review fee.
An example: Assume a journal publishes 100 articles, and the current APC needed to cover costs is V2,000 (total revenue of V200,000). Let us further assume that the desk rejection rate is 1/3 and the acceptance rate (after initial desk review) is 15% (i.e., the overall acceptance rate is 67% × 15% 5 10%). A total of 1,000 papers have been submitted. To earn the same level of revenue, the publisher can charge a submission fee of V75 to all 1,000 submitting authors (5 V75,000); V150 for reviewing to the 670 authors whose articles were not desk rejected (5 V100,500) and another V250 to the 100 authors whose work was accepted for publication (5 V25,000). In this situation, the researcher needs to pay in total V475 if the article is published (see Figure 1), a fraction of the V2,000 APC under the current model, but the total revenue to the journal is still around V200,000. Transaction costs on the side of the publishers will increase under this new model, because more invoices need to be sent out and handled. However, even if those costs are charged to authors as well, the total costs for one published article will still be significantly lower than in the current situation.
Moreover, this adapted APC model can help to avoid free-riding and aiming unrealistically high as a researcher when choosing a journal.
We know from our personal experiences as librarians that scholars only look for a budget to cover the APC once their manuscript has been accepted for publication. For high APCs, they can often feel somewhat reluctant to ask their supervisor, principal investigator, or the library how to cover the costs. In the APC model that we propose, these scholars   We invite editors of OA journals to take the plunge and offer authors the choice between the traditional APC at acceptance or our three-step APC model.

New Perspectives
To us, changing the APC model now seems a much better idea than to wait until that ship has sailed and we end up in an OA world with undesirably high publication (as opposed to processing) charges. If you agree, join us in getting this message across to funders so they can publicly voice their support, and to publishers to help persuade them of the enormous benefits of transparency and fair pricing.

Disclosure Statement
The authors have no relationships or conflicts to disclose.

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