Costs, Prices, and Revenues in Journals Publishing (original) (raw)

There are surprising differences among the prices that university libraries must pay as subscriptions to academic journals, as well as among the fees that authors, or their institutions, should pay as Article Processing Charge (APC) in the author-pay model being increasingly used by the Full Open Access journals. In both “reader-pay” and “author-pay” publishing models, the differences in the subscription prices and in the authors’ fees are startling. We will try, in this article, to briefly describe these differences, by reviewing some of the most widely known studies on this issue, and to try to identify the real costs in scholarly publishing. Our purpose is to provide new publishers and editors, especially those planning to publish an Open Access Journal, with some general guidelines and basic references with regards to the processing costs, so they can take an adequate decision in regards to the Article Processing Charge (APC) of their planned journal. We will also try to present the different business models related to Open Access journal publishing.