This afternoon I am attempting to capture data for Taylor and Francis fully open access journals for the longitudinal open access article processing charges study. A year ago (February 7, 2017) we were able to screen scrape pricing details for all Taylor and Francis fully open access open select journals, in multiple currencies. Today, to find the price one has to go to the <<Taylor and Francis article publishing charge finder>>, where it is necessary to: “Select a journal, type of article, and country to find the open access article publishing charge (APC) list price. “. The types of article listed are Letter to the Editor, original article, or review article. Information on the country selection states: “This should be the country of residence of the person or organization who will pay the APC. Why can’t I find my country? This service is not available to residents of certain countries.” Based on a little bit of research, it appears that the pricing for different countries is given in different currencies. For example, pricing for Acta Biomaterialia Odontologica Scandinavica is 650 USD for authors from Denmark or Mexico but 500 GBP for authors from the United Kingdon.

Comment

This service may be intended to help authors and payers of APCs to quickly ascertain their own cost of publication, and if so seems a useful purpose. However, from the perspective of studying APC pricing, this complicates the process and makes pricing less transparent. For example, in order to know the pricing for all countries, it would be necessary to conduct a search by title, article type, and country, for every country listed. Payers may be less likely to query the price differential resulting from currency fluctuations. For example, as of today the GBP equivalent of 650 USD is 467 GBP, so UK payers of 500 GBP are paying a price that is in effect 7% higher. The impact of currency fluctuations is one of the drawbacks of internationalization of payment for scholarly publishing, whether through subscriptions or APCs. For stability, models that rely on local work and costs such as library / university hosting services or sponsorship of local journals are recommended.

DOAJ: this may help to illustrate one of the reasons why I do not recommend that we ask of DOAJ to list APC amounts. A specific APC for a Taylor & Francis fully open access journal will only be correct for a particular article type and in a specific group of countries. DOAJ’s primary purpose is as a directory, a vetted list of fully open access, peer-reviewed journals, that helps everyone to find open access journals and articles and point others to them. This is important to the health and growth of OA and in opinion it’s enough.

Your comments and clarifications are welcome. Please use the comment function.

Morrison, H. (2018). Taylor and Francis article publishing charge finder. Sustaining the Knowledge Commons / Soutenir Les Savoirs Communs. Retrieved from https://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/2018/02/08/taylor-and-francis-article-publishing-charge-finder/