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In our most recent webinar, we discussed How Libraries and Funders Can Drive APC Transparency. We were lucky enough to be joined by Ashley Farley, Associate Program Officer of Knowledge & Research Services at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Ashley shared her experience working at a major research funder and highlighted the importance of working together with libraries to ensure publishers are more transparent with their Article Processing Charges.

You can watch the full webinar on-demand here and sign up to be notified of our next webinar here.

A little background 

I have worked as a librarian for over a decade, and in that time, I’ve worked in both public and academic libraries, and now more recently for special libraries. I’ve been working at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for 4.5 years and I’ve spent a lot of my time leading their open access initiatives and also running Gates Open Research, which is our platform for rapid, author-led publication and open peer review, powered by F1000 technology. 

How do APCs fit into the traditional publishing model?

The traditional scholarly system involves paywalls –and one way to get around these paywalls is to be affiliated with an institution that has a contract with the subscription provider. Other access options include supporting AOD (article on demand) tokens, buying single access, or renting articles.

The traditional system has revolved around this gated approach to research – but in the last 20-30 years, there has been a big shift towards open access which involves breaking down those paywalls and exploring different business models, including pay-to-publish, preprints, and sharing different versions of a manuscript (know as green open access). Libraries have been key in supporting and promoting the shift to open access – particularly by canceling big deals with publishers and reinvesting in open infrastructure. Some have even established funds for open access publishing for the institutions they support. 

Price Vs Cost

Before we go further, I think it’s important to establish some definitions around cost, price, and APCs. 

Price is what you pay in exchange for goods or services, the amount paid to the seller by the buyer and is often market-driven.  

Cost is the amount of money incurred in producing a product or providing a service.

APCs are fees that are sometimes charged to authors to make a research output available open access in either an open access journal or hybrid journal. These can go by many names including; author choice, open access option, article publishing fee, open access fee.  

Click here to be notified of our next webinar

The importance of transparency 

Promoting transparency creates fully informed buyers, which in this case is the research community. Research has been undertaken to see if the transparency of APCs has any impact on the decision made by researchers on where to publish their work. At Gates, we take our stewardship of funds very seriously – and these conversations are important to us so that we know we are using the funds we have in the best way possible.  

The influence of Plan S

Initiatives like Plan S and cOAlition S are acting as driving forces towards more transparency in APCs:

“With effect from 2021, all scholarly publications on the results from funded by public or private grants provided by national, regional and international research councils and funding bodies, must be published in open access journals, on open access platforms or made immediately available through open access repositories without embargo.”

Wellcome, in partnership with UKRI and on behalf of cOAlition S has appointed Information Power to lead a collaborative project to develop a framework for the communication of open access. The suggested pilot will aim to explore the idea of price transparency and attempt to create a framework. Currently, 8 publishers have agreed to volunteer pricing info in the pilot study which includes F1000.  

Other initiatives 

Here I have included some other initiatives which are always working towards open access publishing: 

Fair Open Access Alliance – a group of scholars and librarians aiming to help transform the conventions of scholarly publishing and return control of the publication process to the scholarly community. 

OpenAPC – The open APC initiative releases datasets on fees paid for open access journal articles by universities and research institutions under an open database license.

Quality Open Access Market – a marketplace for scientific and scholarly journals which publish open access articles   

Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Experience 

At the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, we have been collecting APC data from a central fund since 2015 when we originally launched our open access policy. We decided then the best way to handle these payments would be to have a central fund. We also have a solid data set from 2016 – 2019, which is hosted on the UCLA Dataverse – this has since been downloaded over 120 times. Since then we have gained a greater insight into funder spend and the choice of grantees and authors. With time we hope to compare our collected data with libraries and other funders. 

Click here to watch the full webinar on-demand

What can you do as Librarians?

• Share your APC with the wider community, use this data research purposes and share widely 
• Ask for transparency even if you don’t get it – publishers need to be made aware of what is important to their customer base
• Educate your own community about APC costs – provide information on APCs either before publishing for awareness or upon payment 
• Support and promote publishers who are transparent 

What can you do as Researchers or Authors?

• Ask for pricing transparency when publishing under the APC model and let your journal editor know that this is important to you
• Publish in journals who already practice transparency – by supporting these publishers you can help shape a better ecosystem  
• Share any APC knowledge you do have with colleagues 
• Read and cite open access research

What can you do as Funders?

• Join and support initiatives that drive price transparency 
• Fund open access publishing & open infrastructure 
• Promote transparent publication venues to your grantees 
• Demonstrate the importance of open access publishing in your grant/funding requirements
• Talk to academic libraries that work with your grantee’s institutions 

Points for consideration

A one size fits all approach may not work for all types of publishers, flexibility should be considered as we move forward towards APC transparency, we need to be mindful of legalities such as anti-trust or anti-competition laws and finally, not all funders, libraries, or researchers are privileged enough to afford APCs. Considering a global perspective, with differing economic perspectives, and different currencies will be critical. It’s also important to acknowledge that not all funders/libraries/researches are privileged enough to afford APCs and not all publishers support waiver programs.