One thought on “MDPI 2019: price increases, some hefty, and more coming in July”

1. Response sent to GOAL mailing list on 19 February at 10:38 CET:

   Dear Heather,

   As you noted the APC of several MDPI journals have increased in January 2019, and the APC of several others will increase in July 2019. As Jeroen also noted many did not and will not increase.
   We recently decided to increase the APCs as a matter of long term sustainability of MDPI, for the various reasons explained below.

   As you may imagine the rejection rates across our journals vary, but are significantly higher for journals indexed in Web of Science’s Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE). To give just one example, /Cancers/ which was recently indexed in SCIE and received a first impact Factor ranking directly in Q1 of its category, has seen its submissions increased up by 500% in 2018 and 950% in January and February 2019 while the number of published papers and consequently the revenues is far from having increased proportionally. This is just one example. In 2017 and 2018, 19 journals were accepted in SCIE (i.e. 35% more journals in SCIE) and we have seen the same trend of submission flood for all of them (e.g. /Journal of Clinical Medicine/: +1000% submissions in 2018 and in January and February 2019, /Cells/: +900% submissions in 2018 and +1000% in January and February 2019, /Mathematics/: +650% in 2018 and +450% in January and February 2019, /Electronics/: +500% in 2018 and +300% in January and February 2019).
   Across all MDPI journals, the rejection rate has increased to around 61% in 2018, which means that 98,000 submitted manuscripts were processed but rejected at various stages, often after peer-review.
   As you may know MDPI employs in-house staff to support scholars with the administrative aspects of the editorial process. This adds to the costs on our side, but also means that journal Editors, Guest Editors and Editorial Board Members do not need to take up on their precious time to follow up by themselves with authors and reviewers, or perform administrative duties that take away from their primary academic job. We see this as a service to the research community and is a key to maintaining fast publication times. However, we have to take the cost of processing these rejected papers into account.
   From 2016 to 2018, the average APC for an article finally published in an MDPI journal was around 1000 CHF/USD. This is among the lowest across commercial open access publishers, e.g. see https://treemaps.intact-project.org/apcdata/openapc/#publisher/period=2018.
   We definitely do not (and do not want to) compete with the profit margins of the biggest players in the field, but we need to cover our increasing costs with a sufficient surplus to reinvest in our many new projects (Scilit.net, Sciforum.net, Preprints.org, Encyclopedia.pub, journalsadvisor.com, etc.) for which IT development costs are also quite significant.

   Other aspects that need to be considered are that MDPI cross-subsidizes publication costs in certain fields, like Humanities and Social Sciences, where APC funding is very low or non-existent. Although we joined the Knowledge Unlatched scheme earlier last year, the level of funding was and is still insufficient to fully cover costs for the participating journals, and MDPI had to cover/cross-subsidize the majority of the costs for these journals. Other journals like /Arts/, /Publications/ or several others have remained with no APC for a number of years.

   We also apply waivers for a large number of papers. In 2017 and 2018, over 20% of papers have been published free of charge , either because they were published in a journal with no APC, were invited papers, or were waived when the authors were not able to find funds to pay the APC.

   On another note, I must add that since 2016 MDPI rewards reviewers for the work done on peer-review with vouchers entitling for APC reduction, even when they review for journals with no APC, or for articles which are finally not published.

   As you highlighted in our earlier discussion on APCs, and as Jeroen mentioned today, MDPI has not charged an APC for the first few years of publication and gradually introduced an APC when the journal became more established. We also understand that this could send the wrong signal to the scientific community. Publishing has a cost and potential authors must be aware of this cost when the journal is launched. This is why we decided that as of July 2019 all new MDPI journals (excluding society journals that cover part of these costs) will display an introductory APC of 1000 CHF/USD, which represents nearly the actual costs for publishing a paper (keeping in mind that costs increase when rejection rates increase). Waivers and APC reductions will still be granted for these journals, but we believe that authors will have a better understanding of the publishing costs entailed.

   Let me close by adding that MDPI APCs are still on the lower end of commercial publishers. Our highest APC is currently 2000 CHF/USD, which applies to only two of our journals.
   Moreover, MDPI has endorsed and signed the Jussieu Call for Open Science and Bibliodiversity, which commits us to look at a variety of business models outside of APCs. We would be happy to cooperate on new initiatives (like Knowledge Unlatched) that reduce or remove the direct costs to authors, provided they enable us to cover costs and to operate at scale.

   I hope this helps,
   Best wishes,
   Franck

   Franck Vazquez, Ph.D
   Chief Executive Officer, MDPI
   St. Alban-Anlage 66, 4052 Basel, Switzerland
   Tel. +41 61 683 77 34
   http://www.mdpi.com
   —
   https://sciprofiles.com/profile/66220
   http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7967-3798
   https://www.linkedin.com/in/franck-vazquez-932a96a8/

   On 13.02.19 22:40, Heather Morrison wrote:
   > In brief: MDPI has increased prices, in many cases quite substantially (some prices have more than tripled). Even more price increases are anticipated in July 2019, which will have the effect of doubling the average APC and tripling the most common APC. Unlike other publishers’ practices, there are no price decreases.
   >
   > Comment and recommendation: open access advocates, along with policy makers and research funders, and keen to support a transition to open access. In my opinion, the enthusiasm of payers to support APC journals is causing an unhealthy and unsustainable distortion in the market. My advice: stick with green OA policy. Require deposit of funded works in an open access repository. This is a better means to ensure ongoing preservation and open access, and exerts market pressure in a way that is more suited to the development of an economically sustainable open access system.
   >
   > For details and data, see:
   >
   > https://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/2019/02/13/mdpi-2019-price-increases-some-hefty-and-more-coming-in-july/
   > MDPI 2019: price increases, some hefty, and more coming in July
   > sustainingknowledgecommons.org
   > In brief: MDPI has increased prices, in many cases quite substantially (some prices have more than tripled). Even more price increases are anticipated in July 2019, which will have the effect of do…
   >
   >
   >
   > Heather Morrison
   >
   > Associate Professor, School of Information Studies, University of Ottawa
   >
   > Professeur Agrégé, École des Sciences de l’Information, Université d’Ottawa
   >
   > Heather.Morrison@uottawa.ca
   >
   > https://uniweb.uottawa.ca/?lang=en#/members/706

   Reply

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