APC-Charges of the University of Turku in 2017-2019
Openness of Research is one of the key values of the University of Turku. According to the publishing policy of the University, all scientific publication of the university must be open for all if that is possible concerning the requirements of the international publishers. In 2019, over half of the publication were open. About 40 % publications come out either in FullOA (Golden OA) or in Hybrid (Hybrid OA) publications. The rest were self-archived article copies of the researchers of the University of Turku (GreenOA).
What is an article processing charge (APC-charge)?
FullOA (Golden OA) and hybrid journals usually debit an article processing charge (APC-charge) for publishing the article. In 2019 the total sum of APC-charges for the university was in total 261 795,64 euros.
About 57 per cent of the charges target to FullOA-journals, 43 per cent to journals, which come out in hybrid publishing channels. The average APC-charge for FullOA-journals in 2019 was ca. 1680 euros and for hybrid journals 2050 euros. In 2019, University of Turku paid a bit less APC-charges compared with the previous year 2018.
In total University has paid APC-charges for publishers ca. 727.000 euros, of which 57 per cent for FullOA and 43 per cent for hybrid journals during the last 3 years (2017-2019).
Figure 1. APC-charges of the University of Turku, 2017-2019. Currency is euro.
APC-charges concentrate for 4 big publishers: Whiley (16), Elsevier (12), Springer Nature/Nature Publishing Group (11 %) and for Bio Med Central 7 % (nowadays BMC is a part of Springer Nature). Considering individual journals University paid most for the journals Scientific Reports, Nature Communications and Plos One. All of these journals are nowadays connected to the Springer Publishing Group.
At the University of Turku it is possible to get information of APC-charges at faculty, department and article level. Faculties of Science and Engineering, Medical Faculty and Special Units paid most of the APC-charges. Other faculties paid only a minor amount of the payments. This might be due to better offer of high-appreciated publishing channels for hard sciences.
OpenAPC-service
Since August 2019 University of Turku has been a member of international OpenAPC-service which provides APC-cost information of over 260 organisations. At OpenAPC-service payments can be browsed by organisation, publisher, journal and article.
OpenAPC-service does not, however, provide information of the division of payments within one individual organisation. More detailed information is available through University of Turku data reporting system ("tietovarasto"). You may also ask more detailed information from the library. It should be noticed, however, that on University’s reporting system (“tietovarasto”) the APC-charge is tight to one individual article. In some cases, several departments have paid a part of the article APC-fee. In such cases the report from the University*s own reporting system does not give the correct sum of the department's APC-charges as the payment is always per individual article. It can be estimated in General that around 25 % of the University*s publications have authors from several departments. E.g. if the APC-charge in total is 1500 euros and department A, B and C have paid their own part 500 euros of the charge the amount of 1500 euros is shown on their all's report.
APC-charge monitoring at the University of Turku is based on University’s book-keeping records. University*s financial department identifies APC-charges from the University's incoming invoices and library enriches book-keeping records by publisher and OA-information. University’s book -keeping APC-charge records contain both invoices from the publishers and credit cards payments. It is, however, assumed that the sum of APC-charges in total is a bit higher than reported as some APC-charges might be paid by individual credit cards whose invoices for some reason do not go through University's book keeping.
More information: researchportal@utu.fi