Annual Article Processing Charges (APCs) and number of gold and hybrid open access articles in Web of Science indexed journals published by Elsevier, Sage, Springer-Nature, Taylor & Francis and Wiley 2015-2018

Dataset of annual Article Processing Charges (APCs) for 6,252 journals from 2015 to 2018. The dataset contains annual APCs for journals indexed in the Web of Science (WoS) and published by the oligopoly of academic publishers (Elsevier, Sage, Springer-Nature, Taylor & Francis, Wiley). It also includes an estimate of the total APCs paid by the academic community based on the number of gold and hybrid articles published between 2015 and 2018. The dataset was created using publication data from WoS, OA status from Unpaywall and annual APC prices from open datasets (Matthias, 2020; Morrison, 2021) and historical fees retrieved via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. 

Detailed methods and findings are reported in the following journal article

Butler, L.-A., Matthias, L., Simard, M.-A., Mongeon, P., & Haustein, S. (2023). The Oligopoly's Shift to Open Access. How the Big Five Academic Publishers Profit from Article Processing Charges. Quantitative Science Studies. Preprint: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8322555

Description of included files (v1):

APCs.csv: contains the annual APCs for gold and hybrid OA journals indexed in Web of Science published by the oligopoly of academic publishers (Elsevier, Sage, Springer-Nature, Taylor & Francis, Wiley) between 2015 and 2018 including the total estimate of APCs paid per journal per year. It contains APC data for 18,846 journal-year-OA status combinations.

countries.csv: contains the fractionalized number of annual gold and hybrid OA articles by oligopoly publishers between 2015 and 2018 and the total estimate of fractionalized APCs paid per country per journal per year.

oecd.csv: contains the fractionalized number of annual gold and hybrid OA articles by oligopoly publishers between 2015 and 2018 and the total estimate of fractionalized APCs per discipline per journal per year.

ReadMe.csv: contains a description of the variables used in APCs.csv, countries.csv and oecd.csv.