Abstract
While traditional subscription journal publishers such as Elsevier have been developing a presence in the open access journal market since the 2000s, a few pioneering open access journal publishers have recently decreased the number of articles in their journals. Open access journal publishers’ revenues depend on both the number of articles published and the article processing charges imposed on authors. Therefore, this study investigates the time trends in the number of articles and article processing charges to examine the effect of competition on BMC, formerly BioMed Central, a leading publisher of open access journals. The findings show that the total annual number of articles in BMC journals increased consistently until 2015 but decreased in 2016, irrespective of the introduction of new journals. This study also examines the determinants of article processing charges using a sample selection model. The results show that BMC sets higher article processing charges for more frequently cited journals while setting lower charges for recently launched journals after controlling for other factors. Judging from the trends in the two components of revenues, there is no room to be overly optimistic about the open access journal market, irrespective of the present overall market growth.
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Notes
Although many open access journals have a waiver policy that may discount their APCs based on factors such as author’s country of residence and institutional membership, the APCs in the present study are normal charges where a waiver policy is not applied.
However, Davis (2017b) reported that during the first quarter of 2017, the number of articles in Scientific Reports published by Springer Nature exceeded that in PLOS ONE published by PLOS.
BMC journals that are not registered with the DOAJ have not yet released any articles.
The affiliated journals include several journals financially supported by research institutions. The classification of journals by type is based on the information on the BMC website.
As Bergstrom (2001) pointed out, the recent circulation numbers for individual subscription journals are not available. Therefore, since the circulation numbers are not used as an independent variable in recent empirical studies on subscription journal prices, economies of scale cannot be precisely identified.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) KAKENHI Grant Number 15K03470.
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Asai, S. Changes in revenue structure of a leading open access journal publisher: the case of BMC. Scientometrics 121, 53–63 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-019-03200-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-019-03200-1