Edinburgh stats reveal highest APCs with hybrids

The UK's University of Edinburgh has shared some preliminary figures on article processing charge (APC) spending from its RCUK block grant in the year 2013-14.

The figures in the university library's Open Scholarship blog reveal that the biggest portions of the spend went to Elsevier and Wiley, with £52,596 paid for 36 articles in the case of Elsevier and £51,781 for 35 articles in the case of Wiley. Both of these worked out at an average of just under £1,500 per article.

The next three publishers in terms of money paid to them were Public Library of Science (PLOS), Nature Publishing Group (NPG) and BioMed Central (BMC), which were each paid just over £20,000 for APCs. However, the numbers of APCs that were funded with this money differed greatly between publishers, ranging from an average APC of £989.04 for 24 APCs with PLOS to an average of £2,653.25 for just eight APCs with NPG.

The blogpost observed that the highest APCs were incurred by hybrid journals, who also make money from subscriptions, and article reprints.

According to the university blog post, 'When we get round to submitting the final RCUK report we’ll release our full dataset of article processing charges.'