Business model, pricing, and transparency in neurosurgery and neurology journals

The business model of scientific journals - gold open access (OA), hybrid, or subscription - creates different financial incentives for publishers, since in the author-pays OA model publication fees (Article Processing Charges, APCs) are collected upon acceptance. This descriptive audit surveys 109 neurosurgery and neurology journals from six major publishing groups (Elsevier, Springer Nature/Wolters Kluwer, Wiley, SAGE, Taylor & Francis, Thieme) and verifies, journal by journal, business model, notoriety indicator (Journal Impact Factor or Scimago SJR), publication fee, and, where publicly available, acceptance rate. Every data point was individually re-verified against official publisher pages and Scimago Journal Rank, correcting a JIF/SJR confusion, several unrecorded transitions to full OA, and one misclassified business model present in the initial collection. After verification, 83 journals (76.1%) are hybrid and 26 (23.9%) are full OA, including 5 diamond (no-APC) journals; no journal is subscription-only. Mean notoriety was similar between hybrid and full-OA journals on both indicators tested separately (JIF: 3.51 vs 3.61; SJR: 0.87 vs 0.89), but full-OA journals excluding the five diamond titles showed higher and more dispersed SJR values (mean 1.24, SD 0.93) than the diamond subset (mean 0.20, SD 0.09). Publication fees were, on average, higher for the OA option of hybrid journals ($4,279, SD $755) than for full-OA journals ($3,415, SD $845). Acceptance rate was the least transparent variable: only 6 of 109 journals (5.5%) publish an identifiable rate, all hybrid; no full-OA or diamond journal discloses this figure. This sample is too small, and too skewed toward hybrid disclosure, to support any inference about whether business model influences acceptance decisions; it instead documents a broad lack of acceptance-rate transparency across neurosurgery and neurology journals and identifies pricing, not acceptance behavior, as the dimension on which a verified between-model difference could be established.