Journal publication cost tables and scenarios

For many decades, the hyperinflation of subscription prices for scholarly journals have concerned scholarly institutions. After years of fruitless efforts to solve this “serials crisis”, open access has been proposed as the latest potential solution. However, also the prices for open access publishing are high and are rising well beyond inflation. What has been missing from the public discussion so far is a quantitative approach to determine the costs of publishing a scholarly article, such that informed decisions can be made as to appropriate price levels. Here we provide a granular, step-by-step calculation of the costs associated with publishing primary research articles, from submission, through peer-review, to publication, indexing and archiving. We find that these costs range from less than US$200 per article in modern, large scale publishing platforms using post-publication peer-review, to about US$1,000 per article in prestigious journals with rejection rates exceeding 90%. The publication costs for a representative scholarly article today come to lie at around US$400. We discuss the additional non-publication cost items that make up the difference between publication costs and final price. The dataset refers to calculations about the scenarios described in a publication about that topic.数十年来，学术期刊订阅费用的恶性通胀始终困扰着学术机构。在为解决这一“期刊危机”付出多年徒劳无功的努力后，开放获取（Open Access）被提出作为最新的潜在解决方案。然而，开放获取出版的成本同样高企，且涨幅远超通胀水平。迄今为止，公众讨论中始终缺失一套量化方法，用于测算单篇学术论文的出版成本，以便为制定合理的价格水平提供有据可依的决策依据。本研究提供了一套精细化、分步骤的测算方法，用于计算从投稿、同行评议到出版、索引与归档的原创研究论文出版相关的全部成本。我们发现，采用出版后同行评议模式的现代化大型出版平台，单篇论文出版成本不足200美元；而拒稿率超过90%的顶级期刊，单篇论文成本约为1000美元。当前，一篇典型学术论文的出版成本约为400美元。我们还讨论了构成出版成本与最终定价差额的各类额外非出版成本项。本数据集基于该主题一篇已发表论文中所描述场景的测算结果构建。