Global OA APCs 2010 - 2017: major trends

Abstract

The global OA APC project is a longitudinal study of trends in open access (OA) article processing charges. This article presents major results from the 2017 dataset. In brief, most OA journals do not charge APCs. Non-charging journals appear to be from the not-for-profit sector with some variation of the words "society", "university", or government-related words in the publisher name. The global average APC remains under $1,000 USD, however this is a volatile market with considerable variability. As of 2017, 4 of the 5 largest OA journal publishers by number of journals are traditional commercial scholarly publishers. 5 of the top 25 OA journal publishers are no longer listed in DOAJ.