ANALYSIS AND NEWS
WELLCOME RELEASES DETAILS OF APC SPEND
The Wellcome Trust has shared details of the money it paid for article processing charges in 2012-13. Siân Harris takes a look at the data
T he Wellcome Trust has released
on Figshare the details of article- processing charge (APC) payments that the funder made in 2012-13. The majority of the payments were in the
late hundreds or low thousands. However, sums ranged from a low of £45.94 to a high of £13,200 for an open-access book.
The £45.94 was for a paper entitled The Association between Breastfeeding and HIV on Postpartum Maternal Weight Changes over 24 Months in Rural South Africa, published with the American Society for Nutrition. The high of £13,200 was for Fungal Disease in Britain and the United States 1850-2000, a book published with Palgrave MacMillan.
The highest APC payment for an article was £6,000 for a paper called Laboratory Science in Tropical Medicine, in a journal called Public Service Review. However, it is difficult to find details of this journal and the URL listed for this journal in the Wellcome Trust’s document now appears to be available for sale.
Most of the next 55 entries in the table, sorted by price, were published with Elsevier, with a highest APC of £5,760.00 for a paper in the Lancet. This is followed by a block of papers published with Nature Publishing Group, the highest APC of which is £3,780.00 for a paper in Nature Communications.
The most expensive APCs (at £3,600) published with a purely open-access publisher were two papers published in Public Library of Science’s Neglected Tropical Disease. However, the top end of the price list remains dominated by major traditionally-subscription- based, commercial publishers, particularly Elsevier and Nature Publishing Group. Wiley’s most expensive APC came in at £3,078.92, BMJ’s was £3,600, while the most expensive Informa Healthcare APC paid by Wellcome during the time period was £2,907.42 and Springer’s was £2,759.24.
At the other end of the spectrum, the sub- £1,000 group was dominated by Public Library of Science, especially the journal PLOS ONE, with Oxford University Press also making a strong appearance in the less-expensive APCs
www.researchinformation.info @researchinfo
paid group. The presence of other open-access publishers in this lower group, especially Frontiers and the National Academy of Sciences, is also notable. In 2012-13, the Wellcome Trust made 2,127 APC payments. There are some inconsistencies in describing publishers, which may lead to some error in the numbers attributed to each. However, Research Information estimates that 406 of these payments were to Elsevier journals and 305 to Public Library of Science. Oxford University Press accounted for 116, while Springer picked up 93 of the APCs paid by the Wellcome Trust, with an additional 91
‘The top end of the price list is dominated by major, traditionally-subscription- based, commercial publishers’
for BioMed Central. Nature Publishing Group accounted for 80 of the APCs. Towards the end of the accounting period NPG made a significant investment in Frontiers, which itself counted for 31 of the 2012-13 APC payments. According to the Wellcome Trust, ‘In an attempt to make the debate around the costs of open access publishing more evidence-based, the Wellcome Trust is releasing into the public domain details of its open access spend in the 2012-2013, as reported by UK institutions and the Trust’s Major Overseas Programmes in receipt of an OA block grant’. The funder notes that data only includes information when an APC was levied by the publisher and paid for by the Wellcome Trust. It does not include papers published under a subscription model and available through green open-access or gold open-access papers where the fee was waived, for example due to a promotion.
FURTHER INFORMATION
figshare.com/articles/Wellcome_Trust_APC_ spend_2012_13_data_file/963054
News in Brief
Ireland launches project to bring together its digital collections A project aims to bring the digital collections of Ireland’s cultural institutions to a global audience. Inspiring Ireland will provide free access at one address to the treasures held by Ireland’s cultural institutions, including the country’s national museums, libraries, galleries, archives and theatre. For launch, Inspiring Ireland features a core exhibition – A Sense of Place – accompanied by two further exhibitions – A Sense of Freedom, and A Sense of Identity. These three exhibitions are said to be populated with more than 100 fully- searchable objects.
Kudos integrates metrics data from Altmetric into its platform Kudos has integrated Altmetric into its platform. The integration means that online mentions are now incorporated on the Kudos metrics pages for individual authors, and accompanied by a short summary that further details the number of mentions per source. Each article is assigned a score based on the amount of attention it has received to date, and authors are able to click through to see a sample of the original mentions of their article.
Michael Cairns named as Publishing Technology’s CEO Michael Cairns will take on the role of chief executive officer of Publishing Technology from 1 April. Cairns joined the company in May 2013 as chief operating officer of the company’s online division. He replaces George Lossius who led the company for eight years and was previously chief executive of Vista, one of the companies that merged to form Publishing Technology. Lossius will stay on the board as a non-executive director.
Innovative and Bibliotheca plan product integration Innovative, which provides library services platforms, and Bibliotheca, a provider of RFID and bar-code based technology solutions, are working to integrate the companies’ products. The agreement gives Innovative the rights to resell Bibliotheca’s RFID systems to Innovative customers around the world. The two companies agreed to work jointly to identify and develop technology initiatives that provide leading-edge connectivity between their respective product lines. The agreement also allows Innovative to market the Bibliotheca products under the “triple I” brand.
APRIL/MAY 2014 Research Information 5
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