Article Processing Charge or Article Prestige Charge? An Empirical Analysis of Medical Journals
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.3989/redc.2025.1.1580Keywords:
APC charges, Open Acess, Biliometrics, Citescore, StatisticsAbstract
The Article Processing Charges (APC) are fees paid to publishers for the open-access publication of scientific articles. During the study period, which comprised the years 2019 and 2020, a total of 2,870 medical journals were examined to analyze APCs. Significant variability in APCs within medical journals was observed, with a range between 0 and 8,900 USD. The average APC during this period was 3,128 USD. A positive correlation was estimated between the journal's quality index and the APC, where an additional point in the CiteScore implied an increase of between 65 and 75 USD in the APC. It was found that publications in Spanish have lower APC than Italian or French ones. It is estimated that the CiteScore explains between 38% and 64% of the marginal variation between journals in adjacent quartiles. It is concluded that the journal's reputation has a greater effect than previously documented in the literature on the relative variation of the APC.
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