Making evidence-based decisions about Open Access fees with an open dataset on annual APCs

Thursday May 14, 2026

From 12:30pm to 1:00pm

Open Access / Open Scholarship

The lack of transparency and oversight over the commercial publishing market has resulted in a continuous increase in article processing charges (APCs), which are disconnected from production costs of Open Access (OA) articles. To address this intransparency, our team has developed a comprehensive open dataset of annual APCs which help academic libraries, funders and information scientists to estimate annual spending of APCs. We have recently expanded this dataset to cover 14 major publishers over a seven-year period (2019–2025) allowing both broad and specific analyses of fee developments by OA type (hybrid, gold) and publisher, and in combination with other data sources by discipline, institution or funding agency.

This presentation offers a practical walkthrough of the open dataset, which includes over 70,000 data points for more than 14,000 unique journals derived from publisher price lists, automated scraping, and historic journal fees preserved via the Wayback Machine. Beyond the technical demonstration, we will explore key findings regarding the inflation of APCs and the rise of new pricing models, such as “Subscribe to Open” and “Liberty APC” models as well as Read and Publish Agreements, such as those negotiated by CRKN. We will also discuss the challenges in collecting and preserving pricing data and outline the future directions for this collaborative work.

This session will be of particular interest for librarians, bibliometricians, and to anyone seeking to bring greater transparency to the economics of open access publishing.