Should journals publish how much they received for publishing a paper?
In a recent letter published in Quantitative Science Studies (
dx.doi.org/10.1162/qss_c_003…), I suggest that any Article Processing Charge (
#APC) that has been paid should be noted on the published article. Moreover, the advertised APC fee should be given along with any waiver that has been granted. This is so we know the fee that should have been paid and what was actually paid.
I also argue this data should be provided as part of the metadata stored with the paper so that it is easily accessible to those that want to access it. The alternative is to go through EVERY paper and key in the amounts manually.
A large motivation for the
#OpenAccess movement is to enable those that pay for the research (typically the tax-payer) to have free access to the results of the research they have funded.
To be transparent, would it not be right if the fees paid to the journal was published as part of the paper?
If this happened across the scientific publishing landscape, it would be a lot easier to find out how much we spent on publishing the results of our research.
Views, thoughts, comments?