We paid how much? A case study of APC expenditure at the University of Ottawa

Abstract

The open access (OA) movement has catalyzed change in the scholarly publishing landscape; most notably, new publishing models, such as transformative agreements (and/or Read-and-Publish deals) have emerged alongside traditional subscription models that are funded by libraries in higher education institutions. It has proven challenging for libraries to assess the cost effectiveness of these emerging agreements due to the complexity of estimating article processing charge (APC) spend. As a result, institutions have begun to create and employ a wide range of methods in support of estimating their total expenditures on APCs. For this presentation, researchers from the University of Ottawa introduce a dataset of APC price lists for six large commercial academic publishers (Elsevier, SpringerNature, Wiley, PLOS, MDPI, Frontiers) of OA content and elaborate on its use to support a bibliometric analysis of the publication outputs of the University of Ottawa in 2022. They also present results on estimated overall spend, by OA model, publisher, and by Ottawa faculty.