Open access fees hike universities’ journal bills

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University College London spent the most – almost £3 million – while Imperial College London, and the universities of Birmingham and Bristol, all spent more than £2 million.

The graphic also shows the cost of open access article processing charges (APCs) that the universities paid to “hybrid” journals, which offer both open access and subscription-only content, plus administrative costs. The figures shed light on the scale of “double dipping”, where universities must pay both subscription fees and APCs to a publisher.

According to Monitoring the Transition to Open Access, a report to Universities UK that was released last week, and that is the source of this data, there is “no evidence” that subscription costs have declined, and so “currently, the APCs are examples of additional cost”.

The seven publishers whose fees are included in these totals are Cambridge University Press, Elsevier, Oxford University Press, Sage, Springer, Taylor & Francis and Wiley.

david.matthews@tesglobal.com