Current market rates for scholarly publishing services.

Area of Science:

• Scholarly communication
• Publishing economics
• Academic journals

Background:

• The
• serials crisis
• driven by supra-inflationary journal subscription price increases, has persisted for decades.
• Open access (OA) publishing, while proposed as a solution, also faces high and increasing costs.
• A quantitative understanding of actual scholarly article publishing costs is lacking.

Purpose of the Study:

• To provide a granular, step-by-step calculation of the costs associated with efficiently publishing a scholarly article.
• To inform discussions on appropriate pricing levels for scholarly publications.
• To differentiate between actual publishing costs and final market prices.

Main Methods:

• Detailed cost analysis from article submission through peer-review, publication, indexing, and archiving.
• Calculation of costs for different publishing models, including large-scale platforms with post-publication peer-review and prestigious journals with high rejection rates.
• Comparison of calculated costs with existing data and privately/publicly shared publisher cost information.

Main Results:

• Efficient, large-scale publishing platforms using post-publication peer-review incur costs under $200 per article.
• Prestigious journals with high rejection rates (over 90%) have publishing costs around $1,000 per article.
• The representative cost for publishing a scholarly article today is approximately $400.

Conclusions:

• The actual costs of publishing scholarly articles are significantly lower than the prices charged by many legacy publishers.
• Understanding these core publishing costs is crucial for addressing the serials crisis and setting fair pricing for open access.
• The difference between calculated costs and market prices often includes non-publication-related expenses.