Ashley Farley

@openaccessmaven.bsky.social

508 Followers 375 Following

Open Access Advocate & Librarian - Senior Officer of Knowledge & Research Services at the Gates Foundation- Opinions & endorsements are my own

Publication costs can range from $1500-$5000 per article, detracting from funds that can be used for conducting research, hiring students, and participating in conferences. It is unlikely that the openaccess policies or author payment costs will change in the near future1. We therefore are incentivized to identify opportunities to offset these costs. We can start by looking at sources of revenue generation used by other online media platforms that can be applied to scientific

Going into 2025, we have seen APC pricing increasing but falling back to long-term trends.

Fully OA APC list prices across our sample have risen by around 6.5% compared with 9.5% this time last year.
Hybrid APC list prices have risen by an average of 3% compared with 4.2% this time last year.
Maximum APCs for fully OA journals remain at $8,900.
Maximum APCs for hybrid journals now top out at $12,690 (up $400 from last year).
Big jumps in prices happened last year, driven by high inflation. In 2020-2021 prices were driven up when high-impact journals began offering OA options for the first time. In both cases, increases subsequently fell back to averages.

Underlying trends continue.

There are around 2.6x more hybrid journals than fully OA ones, down from 2.9x a year ago. Hybrid journals follow (or, rather, set) a similar pattern to the market overall.
On average, fully OA prices are around 64% of those of hybrids. This is a couple of percentage points higher than long term trends.
Around 31% of our sample of fully OA journals charge no APCs. (We have separately analyzed the number of articles in OA journals.)
Price rises vary significantly by discipline. Arts & Humanities and Social Sciences have seen particularly large average increases, especially in fully OA journal prices.

I would argue that the current gatekeeper structure of formal (mostly academic) research creates the conditions that foster a war on science. Much of current professional progress in research rewards chasing popular ideas that are sometimes based on a fragile foundation, leading to an abundance of half-baked science. In light of this, one can say that this disaster scenario already exists, even among the highly credentialed. Much of what we fear in a democratized research world is already happening in our gated research world.

If unnerved authors retreat behind the perceived safety of a publisher’s paywall, the reality is that doing so will not prevent use of their works for AI purposes. On the contrary, in signing over their copyright, authors give the same commercial publishers that already exploit academic work a monopoly over their scholarship—and as distasteful as it is, that makes the publisher’s exercise of exclusive control difficult to challenge.

As a result, universities currently pay high costs for a plethora of tools powered by the very content academic authors have created, with AI platforms being the latest in a long string of examples. By contrast, open access to scholarly literature creates a training corpus for academic computational research without publishers as a gatekeeper, enables new analyses and insights, and offers full transparency into the underlying body of source materials.

Over the past twenty years, many academic libraries worldwide have recognised the downsides of journal big deals and are actively seeking alternatives. SPARC’s big deal cancellation tracking reveals that 89universities, largely from the US, have cancelled similar big deals, particularly with the large for-profit publishers involved in ONOS scheme. Notably, MIT Libraries cancelled subscriptions to Elsevier journals in 2020 due to copyright restrictions imposed by the publisher. Since then, MIT Libraries have adopted a ‘pay-per-article access’ model, saving significant costs annually without hindering research or teaching. Ignoring such international experiences, India risks replicating an archaic and flawed strategy, and engaging in the ‘dangerous big deal game’ at a great expense.