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一直困扰着学术机构。在为解决这一“期刊危机”付出多年无果的努力后，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，且涨幅远高于通胀水平。迄今为止，公众讨论中始终缺乏一种量化方法来确定学术论文的出版成本，从而为制定合理定价水平提供决策依据。本研究提供了一套精细化、循序渐进的成本核算框架，用于计算从投稿、同行评审（Peer Review）到出版、索引与归档的原创研究论文全流程相关成本。我们发现，采用出版后同行评审（Post-publication Peer Review）模式的现代化大型出版平台，单篇论文成本不足200美元；而拒稿率超过90%的顶级期刊，单篇成本约为1000美元。当前典型学术论文的出版成本约为400美元。我们还探讨了构成出版成本与最终定价差额的额外非出版成本项。本数据集对应该主题相关出版物中所述场景的核算结果。