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Inclusion of temporary APC waivers in Frontiers’ reported fee support

Determine whether Frontiers’ reported $22.9 million in “fee support” to over 30,000 authors includes the temporary article processing charge waivers applied to 19 Frontiers journals in 2022.

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Background

The paper estimates global APC expenditures using publisher price lists and article counts but cannot directly observe discounts and waivers without transparent reporting. The authors identified journal-year combinations treated as waivers and noted Frontiers’ public statement of $22.9M fee support to over 30,000 authors.

However, the authors explicitly state uncertainty about whether Frontiers’ reported fee support already includes temporary APC waivers for 19 journals. Resolving this uncertainty is necessary to correctly interpret the magnitude and nature of fee support and waivers in the spend estimates.

References

Frontiers reported that they “provided $22.9M in fee support to over 30,000 authors. Of those articles, 44% of authors were from South America, and 38% from African nations” (Frontiers, n.d., para. 19). This amounts to 6.9% of our spend estimate for Frontiers in 2022. However, it is unclear whether this already factors in the 19 journals for which Frontiers had temporarily waived APCs (Table 1).

— Estimating global article processing charges paid to six publishers for open access between 2019 and 2023 (2407.16551 - Haustein et al., 23 Jul 2024) in Section 2.5 Limitations (near Table 1)