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7 news posts in APCs

Frontiers news

08 Dec 2017

Frontiers APCs: Structure and Rationale 2

In the past ten years since the founding of Frontiers, Article Processing Charges (APCs) have become widely accepted as the most transparent and sustainable mechanism of supporting Open Access publishing at high quality. As the sole source of revenue, Frontiers APCs are invested to hire expert teams, provide cutting-edge technology and high-quality services to support our community journals. Frontiers now employs 370 people across 6 countries and continues to release a new version of our Open Science Platform every two weeks, allowing us to ensure quality control and scientific excellence at scale. Experience has taught us that one APC does not fit all communities and we introduced differentiated APCs for our open-access journals two years ago. Specifically, we replaced a flat-fee structure across all Frontiers journals with a differentiated APC structure that takes into account the maturity level of a journal and differences in the level of research funding available in various disciplines. APCs went up for some journals and down for others. This allowed us to bring our formula of building widely read and highly cited impactful journals to a diverse range of academic communities, and it allowed us to subsidise many smaller and newly launched journals, ranging from […]

Open science and peer review

25 Nov 2016

Open Access in Germany – improving all the time

A recent study analyzes the investment in OA publishing by German research institutions, indicating a growing trend toward full open access and raising important questions about hybrid OA journals.

Frontiers news

31 Jan 2016

Frontiers APCs: Structure and Rationale

The number of peer-reviewed papers has been growing at a rate of 20% a year, with over 600,000 estimated open-access papers published in 2014. To keep up with demand, Frontiers has developed technological innovations that provide enhanced services and enable dissemination. We have also striven to find ways to remove the obstacles to publication of sound research by developing a transparent fee structure that links service level to value created. On February 1, 2016, Frontiers introduced a new system for Article Processing Charges (APCs). The new system replaces the flat fee for each of the different article types across all Frontiers journals with a structure where APCs depend on how well the journal is established in the community. Importantly, the structure also takes into account differences in the level of research funding available in various disciplines. Frontiers APC Structure APCs for Type A articles (Original Research, Review, Classification, Clinical Trial, Hypothesis & Theory, Mechanisms of Disease Reviews, Methods, Protocols and Technology Report) published in well-established journals, several of which achieve amongst the highest citation rates within their academic disciplines, and in disciplines where open-access publishing has strong financial support, have been adjusted accordingly from $1,900 to $2,490. For just under half our journals APCs for Type A […]

Open science and peer review

24 Dec 2015

Article Processing Charges: Open Access could save global research

The total number of peer-reviewed research articles published each year increases by approximately 4% [Scopus]. In 2014, nearly 400,000 published research articles were Gold open-access papers. This results in approximately 20% of all research articles — and the number is growing at an astonishing rate of 20% per year (Lewis, 2013). If the rate continues, open-access papers will exceed subscription papers in just a few years from now. This, and similar observations, have led some commentators to predict that traditional subscription journals will soon be a thing of the past (Lewis, 2012). But is this a credible prediction? Is open access capable of disrupting the entire scholarly publishing industry? Can it replace traditional publishing or force it to adopt new business models? The answers depend on whether open access satisfies two fundamental criteria for disruption: an increase in efficiency and a decrease in costs. The new generation of open-access publishers are “born digital” which is undoubtedly far more efficient, but how much will universities, institutes and scientists save by switching to open access ? Brief history of the evolution of open access From the 1950s to the 1990s, nearly all scientific papers were published in subscription journals that were paid for by individual readers or […]

Open science and peer review

22 Dec 2015

Born Digital: building the ultimate open-access publisher

By Pascal Rocha da Silva, Frontiers The digital disruption for analog film started in 1975 with the invention of the digital camera by Steven Sasson and ended with the bankruptcy of Kodak in 2012 (40 years later). The digital disruption in publishing started in the late 1990s with the first online archiving of articles, but it is still far from complete (~30 years into the transition). However, as over 30% of peer-reviewed papers are now published in some form of open-access1, the industry has technically crossed the tipping point for disruption. This is the point where more than just the innovators and early adopters begin using a product or service. Figure 1: Projection of open access versus subscription articles: 2000-2021. Disruptions are driven by economic models that lower costs, and process models that increase efficiency. In 2014, the revenue per subscription article was around $7,000 (calculated from $14 billion revenue for about 2 million articles2 – see article on the cost of publishing), while the average Article Processing Charge (APC) for an open-access article was estimated in our sample at $2,700. This means that, as open-access articles grow to dominate the market, the cost of publishing will eventually drop 2-3 fold, saving libraries and research departments $5 to 10 […]

Open science and peer review

13 Oct 2015

Frontiers’ financial commitment to open access publishing

As a publisher, it is our duty to ensure that the business fundamentals behind Frontiers are sound and sustainable. We are responsible towards the community, to the more than 60,000 researchers who have formally joined our editorial boards, to the 140,000 authors who have published with us, and to our employees.

Open science and peer review

07 Oct 2015

Open Access, a fortune to less developed countries

Not all people have equal access to science. In places where funds are particularly scarce, open access to science could bring fortune. Defining fortune The development of a country is officially measured with statistical indexes such as income per capita, gross domestic product, life expectancy and literacy. Science literacy is more subjective and is not normally considered a basic need; it is nonetheless, of great value for development of a country. From my tiny perspective, science literacy can enrich a population not only locally, by knowledge or application in specific fields, but also very profoundly in the form of wide-spread learning in proximity with the scientific reasoning. Exercising the scientific method builds critical thinking, favoring informed political choices, the adoption of healthier lives and sustainable interactions with the natural environment. Less developed countries tend to invest less in scientific training; often, this is due to their primary need to invest on basic education, health, and infrastructures for their population at large; sometimes it is due to a certain kind of political interest in keeping the population uninformed and conformed. In parallel, it remains a reality that publishing quality scientific articles and data has inherent costs. These are covered by the majority of […]