Article processing charge expenditure in Chile: The current situation

Abstract

The National Agency of Research and Development from Chile is proposing, for the first time, a national OA policy aiming to ensure access to the scientific knowledge contained in publications resulting from research projects and graduate thesis. Since no information regarding APC expenditure in Chile is available, this study examined the cost of APC for the 2019 publications that included at least one Chilean affiliation. The total expenditure for the year 2019 was estimated at USD 9,129,939. The results confirm that almost one third of the total APC was spent on publications from Health & Medical Sciences, research area with the highest APC (USD 6000). Furthermore, five commercial publishers collected 52% of the total APC expenditure. Unfortunately, the cost of publishing in some journals is so high that it causes detrimental effects on the research capacity of under resourced individuals. In the Chilean scenario, APC is not well suited to scale as most universities do not have an OA budget to support researchers that are eager to publish their work in OA journals. Perhaps the implementation of an OA policy ought to be accompanied by sustainable APC funding grants aimed at supporting under resourced researchers that want to make their research freely available.