What is the future of Article Processing Charges

What is the Future of Article Processing Charges (APCs)?

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Answering a question like “What is the Future of Article Processing Charges (APCs)?” is essentially asking for a crystal ball reading of the entire scholarly publishing industry, which, as we all know, is rarely a quiet place. The world of academic publishing is in constant flux, primarily driven by the irresistible force of the Open Access (OA) movement and the seemingly immovable object of established commercial publishers. 

The Article Processing Charge (APC) model, once touted as the shining savior of OA, has morphed into a significant point of contention, leading us to question its long-term viability. What we’re seeing now isn’t a simple evolution; it’s a full-blown transformation where costs are ballooning, new models are fighting for prominence, and the very concept of fair access is under the microscope. Let’s dive into the messy, complicated, and utterly fascinating future of APCs.

Introduction

What is an Article Processing Charge?

An APC is a fee levied on authors, their institutions, or funders to make an article immediately and permanently open access upon publication. It emerged as the primary business model for Gold Open Access, replacing the traditional subscription model, where readers or libraries paid to access content. On the surface, it’s brilliant: the public gets free access, and the publisher covers its costs. However, the ‘author-pays’ system has become a lightning rod for criticism, creating new barriers to entry and causing financial stress for researchers globally.

The core issue boils down to cost and equity. APCs for high-impact journals can be breathtakingly expensive, often ranging from $2,000 to over $12,000 per article. This shift has changed the financial burden from a central institutional budget (the library) to individual research groups, departments, and grant-funding bodies. For an early-career researcher in a less-funded discipline or institution, paying a $5,000 APC for a prestigious journal is not just a financial hurdle; it’s often an impassable wall. 

The debate is no longer about whether research should be open, but how it should be funded without replacing one restrictive payment barrier with another. The future of APCs is therefore tied directly to the success of alternative, more equitable funding mechanisms and the willingness of major publishers to moderate their profit-driven pricing strategies.

The Problem With the Present: APC Inflation and Inequity

To understand where APCs are going, we first need to confront their current failings. The APC model promised to foster competition and reduce costs, but the reality has been quite different. We have seen a steady, sometimes dramatic, escalation in the price of APCs, frequently outstripping inflation rates. This phenomenon is often referred to as “APC price inflation” or “serial price crisis 2.0.” 

A study on APCs across major publishers from 2019 to 2023 revealed a substantial increase in costs. Median APCs for gold open access articles rose to approximately $2,450 in 2023, reflecting a notable upward trend in publishing expenses over this period. Further, more than 89% of journals increased their APCs between 2019 and 2023, often exceeding inflation rates, highlighting a significant rise in the financial burden on authors and institutions for open access publishing. 

Major publishers, particularly in high-impact hybrid journals, command even higher fees. For instance, some premium journals have APCs exceeding $10,000, with a handful reaching over $12,000. The argument from publishers is that these fees cover the full suite of publishing services: peer review management, production, hosting, indexing, and editorial curation. 

However, critics point to the exceptionally high profits and profit margins of major commercial publishers, sometimes exceeding 30%, suggesting that the fees are driven by shareholder demands rather than actual cost recovery. It’s hard to justify a $12,000 publication fee when some analyses estimate the actual marginal cost of processing a manuscript to be closer to a few hundred dollars.

This inflated pricing structure has profound consequences for research equity. It creates a ‘rich get richer’ scenario where researchers from well-funded institutions and wealthier nations—largely in the Global North—can easily afford to publish in the most prestigious OA journals, gaining the associated citation advantage and career benefits. 

Conversely, researchers from low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) or institutions with limited grant funding are essentially relegated to publishing in less prestigious journals, or journals with lower APCs, regardless of the quality of their work. While many publishers offer waivers or discounts for LMIC authors, these programs are often inconsistent, complex to navigate, and fail to address the systemic funding disparities. The APC model, in its current form, risks creating a new, economically determined paywall that undermines the global spirit of open science.

Regulatory and Funder Intervention: The Scrutiny Intensifies

The ballooning cost of APCs has not gone unnoticed by the most important stakeholders: the research funders and governmental bodies that ultimately foot the bill. These institutions are the ones paying APCs through grants and ‘Big Deal’ contracts, and they are starting to push back. This top-down pressure is perhaps the most significant force shaping the future of APCs.

The most visible example of this intervention is the rise of Open Access mandates, such as the influential Plan S in Europe and recent policy changes in the United States, like the one from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Plan S, spearheaded by cOAlition S, requires that research funded by its members must be made immediately open access, often through Gold OA or transformative agreements, but it also strongly discourages the use of hybrid journals (subscription journals with an OA option).

Crucially, the NIH has announced plans to cap publication costs starting in fiscal year 2026 to ensure a more transparent and more reasonable boundary for the stewardship of taxpayer funds. This move is a direct response to escalating APCs. Even a generous cap, for example, at $6,000, would still leave APCs for a significant percentage of articles in top-tier journals partially uncovered, forcing authors to find the difference elsewhere. 

This type of regulatory action signals a hardening stance against unchecked pricing. It will inevitably force publishers to either restructure their APCs or risk losing access to large pools of state-funded research. The days of simply increasing the APC without justification are coming to an end.

The other major structural change is the proliferation of Transformative Agreements (TAs), often called ‘Read and Publish’ or ‘Publish and Read’ deals. These are large-scale contracts negotiated between institutions, library consortia, or funders and major publishers (like Elsevier, Springer Nature, and Wiley). Under a TA, the institution pays a single, bundled fee that covers both the historical subscription costs (Read) and the APCs for their affiliated authors to publish open access in the publisher’s journals (Publish). 

While TAs have accelerated the transition to OA—making nearly 70% of articles from major publishers OA by 2024, according to some estimates—they are a double-edged sword. They effectively channel library budget funds, which were previously for reading, into paying the APCs for authors, thereby solidifying the APC model as the dominant revenue stream for large commercial publishers, albeit through a different payment channel.

The Rise of the Alternatives: Diamond and Non-APC Models

The most compelling challenge to the APC model comes from alternative, fee-free models, collectively known as Diamond Open Access (Diamond OA). This model is the true spirit of open science: it is free for the reader and free for the author. 

Diamond OA journals are typically funded by a collective of universities, research institutions, societies, or government agencies through grants, subsidies, or in-kind support, such as the use of institutional infrastructure and volunteer editorial work. The Diamond OA model is gaining significant momentum globally. It is particularly strong in regions like Latin America, where it has historically been the primary mode of scholarly communication. 

Data shows that a substantial majority of the journals indexed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) do not charge APCs, demonstrating the viability of this model, particularly among smaller, society-run, or institutionally-supported publications. International organizations, including the EU Council of government ministers, have thrown their support behind Diamond OA, recognizing it as the most equitable path forward. 

Beyond Diamond OA, publishers and institutions are experimenting with other non-APC financial models:

  • Subscribe to Open (S2O): This model converts subscription journals to Open Access. The publisher announces that if a sufficient number of subscribers renew their subscription for the coming year, the content for that year will be made immediately open access for everyone. If subscription renewals fall short, the journal reverts to the subscription model. It leverages existing library budgets and is a low-risk way to transition to OA.
  • Community Action Publishing (CAP): Pioneered by organizations like PLOS, this involves institutions paying a fixed annual fee based on their authors’ publishing activity or potential. Once the fee is paid, their researchers can publish without any per-article charge, turning publishing into a communal service covered by a predictable, flat fee.
  • Green Open Access: While not a business model per se, the practice of authors self-archiving their accepted manuscripts in institutional or subject-specific repositories after an embargo period (Green OA) offers a non-APC route to public access. Stronger funder mandates for immediate or short-embargo Green OA could severely undercut the commercial rationale for high APCs.

These alternatives show that the future is unlikely to be solely defined by the APC. The publishing world is segmenting, with high-cost commercial Gold OA at one end, and an increasingly supported, community-driven Diamond OA at the other.

Technology’s Role: Decentralization and Efficiency

Technological advances are also quietly chipping away at the justification for high APCs by drastically reducing the cost of publishing. The current APC structure often subsidizes legacy print operations and centralized, proprietary IT infrastructure. Newer, decentralized, and more efficient platforms are challenging this status quo.

Tools like the Open Journal Systems (OJS), a free, open-source software application used by thousands of journals worldwide, provide all the necessary infrastructure for submission, peer review, and publication at a minimal cost. This software is a key enabler for the global Diamond OA ecosystem. Moreover, the growing use of preprints on public servers like arXiv, bioRxiv, and medRxiv is fundamentally changing the scholarly process. Preprints allow for the immediate sharing of research, often for free, which puts immense pressure on journals to justify their APCs for what is essentially just the peer review and certification service.

Looking further ahead, Web3 and blockchain technologies, while still nascent in publishing, offer the potential for a radically decentralized publishing model. Imagine a system where peer review is managed on a transparent, immutable ledger, and reviewers or editors are rewarded with small micropayments or tokens, completely bypassing the need for a large, profit-driven publishing intermediary. 

While this is currently a speculative concept, its potential to drop the cost of content acquisition and production to near zero is significant. Technology is making publishing dramatically cheaper, and that fundamental reality will eventually break the back of the high-APC model.

Forecasting the Future: A Polarized Landscape

So, what is the fate of the Article Processing Charge? It’s not going to vanish overnight, but it is certainly going to be profoundly reformed, and its dominance will be significantly reduced. The future of APCs will likely be highly polarized and driven by a two-speed scholarly publishing economy.

On one side, the High-Stakes, High-Cost Commercial Gold OA model will persist, but under greater pressure. The most selective, high-prestige journals—those with the strongest brand power—will continue to charge premium APCs, likely pushing towards the upper limits of the new funder caps (e.g., around $6,000). They will argue that the cost covers high rejection rates and extensive editorial services, and authors in a highly competitive academic market will continue to pay them for the career advantage they confer. 

However, a significant portion of their revenue will increasingly come from large, bundled transformative agreements, rather than individual author payments. The biggest change here is that the payment will become institutionalized and centrally negotiated, making the cost visible and subject to intense scrutiny, which will inherently restrain price escalation.

On the other side, the Low-Cost, High-Equity Diamond OA model will flourish, becoming the default option for a huge number of articles globally. Driven by funder mandates that favor non-APC models and the ethical imperative for equitable access, the Diamond OA ecosystem will be bolstered by international investment and new, centralized infrastructure support. 

Many new journals and journal ‘flips’ (converting from subscription to OA) will adopt this zero-APC approach, recognizing that the long-term sustainability lies in institutional and governmental support for open public infrastructure, not in extracting fees from individual authors.

In essence, APCs will evolve from being the main OA business model to being a premium charge for high-prestige, high-service publishing, with a cap on their runaway inflation imposed by major funders. For the vast majority of scholarly output, however, the future lies in the Diamond model, funded as a public good, not as a commercial product. The transition won’t be clean or quick, but the trajectory is clear: the APC, while enduring, will be increasingly challenged, regulated, and ultimately marginalized by more equitable and sustainable funding mechanisms.

Conclusion

The Article Processing Charge model, while instrumental in kickstarting the Open Access movement, has proven to be a flawed mechanism for achieving truly open and equitable scholarly communication. It simply exchanged a reader-facing paywall for an author-facing one, often at a price point that exacerbated global research inequities.

The future of APCs is one of necessary constraints and competition. Powerful forces are aligning against their unchecked growth: major funders are imposing caps and favoring non-APC routes, the global community is mobilizing behind the equitable Diamond OA model, and new technologies are drastically lowering the actual cost of publishing. The APC will remain a significant, high-cost feature in the most prestigious corners of academic publishing, primarily sustained by institutional transformative agreements. But its overall market dominance will erode as the zero-APC, institutionally-supported Diamond model gains ground and becomes the ethical and economic default for a truly open research future. 

The publishers that thrive will be those that embrace transparency, moderate their fees, and find genuine ways to align their revenue with the actual, justifiable costs of quality editorial service, rather than simply charging what the market—or, more accurately, the funder—will bear.

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