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In this blog post Michael Markie, Publishing Director at F1000 Research, outlines the upcoming adjustments to the pricing structure on Gates Open Research, whilst Ashley Farley, Program Officer of Knowledge and Research Services at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation discusses the importance of price and service transparency of the platform and how this aligns with the Plan S principles.   

Last month, F1000 Research rolled out a new pricing structure complete with price transparency for its platform. As the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is a cOAlition S signatory, we knew that Gates Open Research (GOR) would need to make its pricing structure transparent, so that it meets the criteria of a fully Plan S compliant publishing platform. So, we are announcing our new pricing and service framework for GOR, which ensures a fairer and more representative pricing across all academic subject areas funded by the foundation while providing full transparency on what those prices comprise of. 

2020 marks three years of publication for GOR, and over this time the platform has grown in popularity and size, along with publishing research across the full range of academic subject areas the foundation supports. F1000 Research have analysed the publications on GOR to determine if the word count pricing structure is representative for all the published content to date. We particularly wanted to see if there was a bias towards the cost of articles in different subject areas that the foundation fund. Subject areas like education and social science research typically produce articles that are longer, so we also wanted to see if the editorial service we were providing aligned with the cost of publishing article in these areas. The results of this analysis showed that there was room for improvement, and we think the new pricing structure described below better accommodates for a fairer approach to pricing that works across all academic subjects and better represents the editorial service that is required.  

We have subsequently combined this work with the article processing charge (APC) transparency requirements necessary for Plan S compliance.

Pricing structure: past and future

APC fees on GOR were previously based on article length, founded on the principle that, in general, shorter articles typically have less data associated with them and should therefore be simpler to conduct the pre-publication checks and be quicker and easier to get peer reviewed compared with longer, full-length research articles.

During the 3 years of running this pricing model, we have learned several things. Firstly, researchers rarely publish single figure findings. Secondly when they do, they are often equally associated with significant research data, meaning that they take no less effort to conduct the pre-publication checks, and are no easier to get peer reviewed.

Secondly, we found that articles that were published with over 8,000 words were typically articles outside medical and health subject areas where it is more common for authors to write longer articles; under investigation these articles were not requiring an editorial service that warranted the $2000 price mark.

In short, the logic for basing APCs on word count was not adequately representing the editorial service we provide and was not supportive towards those subject areas that typically have longer articles.

Introducing Article Type Pricing

The way we structure the pricing has now changed from word count bands to article types. To aid the development of this new pricing structure, we analysed the editorial service we provide for each of the article types that we support. From that analysis, we have created three price categories for our new article type pricing structure. These categories are based on:

•            article types that are quicker and simpler to check prior to publication

•            article types that are easier to support the authors in the sharing of the underlying data

•            article types that are easier to obtain peer reviews for

Figure 1. New Gates Open Research pricing structure and price transparency

This new pricing will come into effect for all submissions to GOR from 1st October 2020. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation will continue to cover the cost for all article fees centrally.

Price Transparency

Our original open access policy was introduced five years ago. While we have seen great progress in our goal to make publishing outputs more freely available, we have an opportunity to strengthen this momentum and tackle even bigger health challenges by evolving our policy to align with Plan S. For more information on our policy changes visit the Open Access Policy website.

This page shows full price transparency breakdown for each of the new article type categories used at GOR, together with full explanation of the expenditure breakdown in terms of the services provided.  The information provided here adheres to the cOAlition S-approved Price Transparency framework developed by Information Power.

This exercise has been instructive in helping understand the services associated with publishing and for us as a funder to understand how an APC is priced. We have always received value for what we have paid for Gates Open Research and are now more clearly seeing how this equates to price and sustainability of the open research model. We are looking forward to seeing other publishers who were part of the price transparency pilot release their own APC breakdowns too so we can compare prices across journals.