Webinar together with the OpenAPC team on the transparency of publications fees

An overview and a quick dive into the transparency of publication fees (APCs).

About 100 viewers attended the webinar on March 25, 2019. The event consisted of two presentations: 

He also explained how new participants can join OpenAPC and how reusable APC data can be obtained in the first place. At the moment there are more than 230 institutions/organisations who share their APC data with OpenAPC initiative. OpenAIRE is one of these organisations who started to participate in the context of the former FP7 Post-Grant OA Pilot. OpenAPC provides cost data on 75,335 open access journal articles and amounting up to 150 million EUR with an average payment of 1,960 EUR per article. The initiative publishes the data frequently at GitHub ( https://github.com/OpenAPC/openapc-de/blob/master/README.md ).

The APC data can be visualized as a treemap to get an overview of "Journals", "Publishers", or "Institutions" and can also be filtered by "year", "country", or "hybrid status" - see figure 1 or discover https://treemaps.intact-project.org/apcdata/openapc/#journal/ yourself.

This was the opening event in the OpenAIRE Advance project. OpenAIRE will continue the work on "Transparency of publication fees" and the collaboration with the OpenAPC initiative on aspects like: How can APC data be integrated into OpenAIRE? How can researchers, project managers, and/or funders benefit from that data?

Andreas Czerniak compared the OpenAPC dataset with publication data in OpenAIRE showing that over 90% of the OpenAPC journal articles are also present in OpenAIRE. The average APC payment is 1,958 EUR which is a little below the average OpenAPC value. He also demonstrated how the combined data could be used to obtain detailed information on APC expenditures for funders, funding programs, and funded projects. 

As an example, the funded project: The Human brain project (HBP) has the highest payment per article, 3,995 EUR which is twice as high as the average APC value (based on the OpenAPC data, v3.55.1). 

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This was the opening event in the OpenAIRE Advance project. OpenAIRE will continue the work on "Transparency of publication fees" and the collaboration with the OpenAPC initiative on aspects like: How can APC data be integrated into OpenAIRE? How can researchers, project managers, and/or funders benefit from that data?

The presentations and recording of the webinar are available via the following links:

Presentations: https://doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.33517.03040
https://bit.ly/2U3pnoM
Recorded webinar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v323ebK45po

For questions concerning transparency of publication fees or the OpenAPC project itself, please contact openapc(at)uni-bielefeld.de .

If you have a question about the collaboration of OpenAPC initiative and OpenAIRE, please contact me. 

​This treemap provides detailed information up to the depth of the article. The up-to-date treemap can be found at https://treemaps.intact-project.org/apcdata/openapc/#journal/ .