APCheck releases "2023 Global OA Journal and APC Monitoring Report"

Since the APCheck Annual Monitoring Report was first released in 2020, it has garnered widespread attention from all sectors. The Open Science Research Office of the Library of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has continued to track and analyze the publishing of OA journals and the trends in APCs. In March 2024, we completed the "2023 Global OA Journals and APC Monitoring Report" and convened an expert consultation meeting in mid-April, inviting scientists, science and technology managers, data experts, publishing experts, and librarians. The experts unanimously recommended its publication to provide the monitored data and analysis results for reference by all parties.

Some of the results from the "2023 Global OA Journals and APC Monitoring Report" (Public Edition) are as follows:

01 The pace of global OA publishing accelerated in 2023, with more traditional publishers beginning to make significant efforts.(1) SCIE listed 7,754 OA journals, among which the number of hybrid OA journals is 2.8 times that of full OA journals. (2) Mathematics, Pharmacology & Pharmacy, and Oncology are the disciplines with the most OA journals. (3) There were 89 new OA publishers. (4) There was a 2.2% decrease in global OA article publication. (5) MDPI became the publisher with the highest volume of OA articles globally. (6) Oxford University Press (OUP) and the American Chemical Society (ACS) entered the top 10 global OA article publishers. (7) SpringerNature's journal Scientific Reports published the highest volume of OA articles globally.

02 The commercialization of global OA became more apparent in 2023, with a variety of strategies to maximize profits under the APC model.(1) There were differences in the APC pricing models of publishers, and the transparency of APC policies remained an issue. (2) Journals with zero APCs accounted for 5.2% of all OA journals. (3) The global average APC was $2,957, with an annual increase of 7.4%. (4) Global APC revenues exceeded $2.675 billion, an annual increase of 8.4%. (5) MDPI was the publisher with the highest APC revenue globally. (6) Among the top 10 publishers in global APC revenue, the Institute of Physics (IOP) had the fastest revenue growth. (7) MDPI's International Journal Of Molecular Sciences had the highest amount of APCs paid by authors globally.

03 The annual growth rate of China's OA article publication and APC expenditure slowed in 2023.(1) Chinese authors published OA articles in 5,779 OA journals. (2) Chinese authors' share of global OA publications was 29.5%, with an annual increase of 2%. (3) The share of APCs paid by Chinese authors was 28.0% globally, with an annual increase of 15.4%. (4) Chinese authors paid APCs mainly to seven publishers, each receiving more than 100 million RMB. Elsevier had the highest increase in APC revenue, at 67.1%. (5) The top 10 disciplines for APCs paid by Chinese authors were concentrated in multidisciplinary and engineering-focused areas. (6) MDPI had the highest APC revenue in China, accounting for 45.6% of its global APC income. (7) The OA publication volume of projects funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China decreased by 4.8%, and the APC expenditure grew by 15% annually. In 2022, these figures had annual growth rates of 31% and 33%, respectively.

About APCheck

APCheck is a tool for querying OA journals from SCIE sources and APCs, independently developed by the Library and Information Center of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. APCheck includes over 7,000 OA journals from SCIE sources, offering an APC query service. It compares the APCs and influence of different journals within the same field, indicating whether a journal's APC is reasonable within its field and alerting to the threshold of 20,000 RMB for journal APCs.

For contact regarding the "2023 Global OA Journals and APC Monitoring Report" (Public Edition), please email: openresources@mail.las.ac.cn