E.G. Tocco1, M.G. Mercante1, N. Kuchimanchi1, M. El Moheb1, R.G. Witt1 1University Of Virginia, Department Of Surgery, Charlottesville, VA, USA
Introduction:
The use of open-access (OA) journals is an advantageous way to make published research more accessible to the general public, as it does not require readers to pay to access these journals. However, the majority of OA journals place a financial burden on researchers seeking to publish their work by requiring them to pay an article processing charge (APC). To date, no study has explored the relationship between APCs and indicators of journal prestige, including journal impact factor (JIF), publication model type, and the proportion of OA publications across different medical specialties. Our study examines the correlation between publication costs and measures of journal prestige across different medical specialties.
Methods:
In this study, data on both hybrid and OA journals in 29 different medical specialties were compiled from Journal Citation Reports and journal websites. Measures of central tendency for APCs and Pearson correlation coefficients between APCs and various journal characteristics, including JIF, journal citation indicator (JCI), citation counts, and percentage of OA journals, were assessed for each specialty. Additionally, journals were categorized into quartiles based on APCs and analyzed according to factors including JIF, publishing model type, and total citation numbers. Linear regression was used to assess the extent to which these journal characteristics account for the variance in APC.
Results:
Our study examined 1,037 journals across 29 medical specialties. Only journals in the first JIF quartile were included due to their higher prestige. It revealed a significant variance in median prices between journal specialties, with hematology/oncology journals having the highest median APC ($4,690.00) and primary care journals the lowest ($2,595.00). Hybrid journals were found to have a significantly higher median APC than OA journals ($4,236.28 vs. $2681.69, p<0.001). JIF and proportion of OA publications per journal were found to account for only 13.04% of variance in APC among Q1 journals. Very weak positive correlations were observed between APC and both JIF (r = 0.14) and citation counts (r = 0.17), while a weak negative correlation (r = -0.33) was found between APC and the proportion of OA publications per journal.
Conclusion:
The correlations between APC and measures of journal prestige were very weak, indicating that these factors have minimal influence on determining APCs despite their potential to influence authors’ choice of journals for publication. Similarly, over 85% of the variation in journal prices is not attributable to journal prestige but rather to factors unknown to authors. Additionally, hybrid journals were found to have higher APCs compared to fully open-access journals across all medical specialties. Further research is necessary to identify the factors influencing APCs, particularly as publishers increasingly move from subscription-based models to open-access.