Delta Think’s Dan Pollock and Heather Staines, with data on APC prices and inflation:
Overall, OA prices are increasing below inflation. The data suggest that authors continue to get (modestly) increasing value for money for their OA fees.
APCS, of course, have never had any meaningful relationship with “costs”—not ever, not since their inception in the early 2000s. So the idea of increasing “value” is a bit off-key—the unscalable wall for the vast majority of the world’s scholars is a few inches shorter but still comically high.
However, the headlines are skewed by the large number of hybrid journals. When looking only at fully OA (“gold”) journals, prices are rising slightly faster than inflation. Our market sizing data suggest that significantly more articles are published in fully OA journals than in hybrid, so the inflationary effects will be more prevalent than the real-terms cost savings for hybrid. Although it’s worth noting that fully OA prices are cheaper than those for hybrid, so they are growing from a lower base.
“lower base.”
As discussions continue about the increasing cost and affordability of OA, it’s important to keep an eye on the nuances of real terms effects.
“Real terms” effects are basically irrelevant in the discussions around cost and affordability of closed-authorship OA: Standard APCs, this year or last year or next year, are so unaffordable that tinkering around the inflation-edges is meaningless.