On our Twitter account, we recently ran a poll which asked who should pay the Article Processing Charges for a paper.
We gave four choices:
- University
- Research Funder
- Publisher
- Author
We ran the poll for seven days (27 Jun 2022 to 4 Jul 2022). We are slightly disappointed that we only received 18 responses. Ideally we would liked to have gotten into the realm of statistical significance, but we know that we are a long way from that.
But, the results are interesting, even if we cannot say that they are conclusive in their views.
The results can be seen in the image below and the result on Twitter can be seen here.
What can we say about these figures? Not much, as the sample size is so small but it does appear that nobody thinks that an author should pay the APC, but they should be paid by one of the other stakeholders, with the majority believing that the research funder should bear the burden.
We find it surprising that anybody thinks that the publisher should pay. Whilst it would be nice, they are essentially a company that has to return a profit to their shareholders. If they funded the APC’s (indeed, they charge them), there would be no income stream.
Of course, and in the context of what we focus on this web site, there are publishers around, so called predatory publishers, who are only in business to make money from APCs. They do not have any regard for respecting the integrity of the scientific archive and they are certainly not interested in helping fund APCs.
Anyhow, it was an interesting poll. It’s a shame that more people did not participate but we do plan to run more polls in the future.
