More on the fee hike at PLoS

David Secko, Author fee spikes at PLoS, TheScientist, June 19, 2006. Excerpt:

Open access publisher Public Library of Science (PLoS) is raising its publication fee for the first time since its inception in 2003, hiking rates by up to two-thirds the original cost. Advocates of the open access model say the increase reflects how much it costs to publish an article, and does not suggest that the publisher or the model are failing. Starting July 1, the fees, which are paid by authors to offset production costs, will increase from $1,500 for PLoS's flagship journals (PLoS Biology and PLoS Medicine) to $2,500, and to $2,000 for its other journals.

"The reason we're increasing the fees is so that they more closely reflect the cost of running the journals," said Mark Patterson, director of publishing at PLoS. "We have to move slowly but surely towards a financially sustainable organization and this is part of putting us on that path," Patterson told The Scientist. He said the journal wasn't in financial trouble, and instead had grown to a point that it thought the scientific community was ready to absorb more costs....

Matthew Cockerill, publisher at BioMedCentral, another open access publisher and sister company to The Scientist, said article publication charges are converging to approximately $2000-3000 USD for open access journals. BMC currently charges between $605 and $1750 per article, and has been "transitioning to this fee," he told The Scientist, "which we feel is a good representation of our costs."

"It takes time for any system to find its equilibrium," said Cockerill, "so things like PLoS and BMC adjusting its publication charges is all part of the settling down process." He added that bigger commercial publications such as Springer charge $3000, "but if they do find that some publishers can break even charging $1,500 or $2,000, they will find it difficult to charge what they do."

In addition, Patterson admitted that the increased fees at PLoS may be a barrier to some authors. "Some scientists will not have access to the funds needed to pay the new publications fees," said Patterson, "and we don't want this to block someone with a great piece of work." PLoS is therefore still retaining its fee waiver policy, he said, where authors can request not to pay the publication charge....