This dataset contains details of 6,943 article processing charges (APCs) paid by 25 higher education institutions in the UK during 2014. The data was collected as part of Jisc Collections’ APC data collection project and has been released with permission from the institutions who provided the data. The data has been aggregated, normalized, and archived as a single CSV file. It will be of interest to those seeking to understand the scale of open access payments within the UK, and could be reused by combining it with subscription and APC expenditure data from other sources

Lawson, Stuart

English

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(1) Overview
Context
Article processing charges (APCs) are fees which are some-
time paid in order to make a research article, or other 
research output, open access. In the UK many institutions 
now spend significant amounts on APCs, particularly in 
light of the policies of RCUK and the Wellcome Trust which 
make specific funds available to pay APCs [1, 2]. The fact that 
institutions now pay fees for both subscription journals and 
APCs to the same publishers is a cause for concern for both 
institutions and policy makers [3]. Jisc Collections, as the 
body which negotiates journal subscription deals on behalf 
of UK academic libraries, now includes both subscription 
and APC expenditure in its negotiations. The data presented 
here was gathered in order to inform these negotiations.
(2) Methods
Steps
Following the sampling strategy outlined below, all insti-
tutions were contacted by email and asked to provide 
data. Some institutions used Jisc’s recommended tem-
plate spreadsheet [4]. For those that did not, their data 
was converted to fit this template by mapping corre-
sponding fields. Files for individual institutions are also 
available [5]. Data was then compiled into a single CSV file 
with an additional column named ‘Institution’ to identify 
the source and normalized as outlined below.
Sampling strategy
In 2014, 23 institutions had provided APC data to Jisc 
Collections covering payments made in 2013. The same 
institutions were asked to repeat the exercise in 2015 
for payments made in 2014. 22 of those institutions 
(listed under ‘Dataset creators’) agreed to participate 
and release their data openly. One institution agreed to 
provide data but not to release it openly. Three further 
institutions (Plymouth University, Durham University, and 
Loughborough University) were also asked to provide data 
in order to increase the size of the dataset. They were cho-
sen because they were in receipt of an RCUK block grant 
but are in Jisc bands 4 and 5 [6], which were underrepre-
sented in the original sample.
Quality Control
Data was normalized by standardizing the data for 
easy comprehension. For example, converting all date 
formatting to DD/MM/YYYY where known; standard-
izing abbreviations and punctuation; and using only 
one variation of a publisher or journal name e.g. PLOS 
rather than Public Library of Science. The number of 
entries in the fields ‘ISSN’ and ‘Type of publication’ was 
increased by copying data across, e.g. if one entry for 
PLOS Genetics had the ISSN listed as 1553–7390 then 
the rest would also.
(3) Dataset description
Object name
APCs-2014-combined.
Format names and versions
CSV.
Creation dates
2015-01-20 to 2015-03-24.
DATA PAPER
Article Processing Charges Paid by 25 UK Universities 
in 2014
Stuart Lawson1
1 Research Analyst, Jisc Collections, GB  
Doctoral Researcher, Birkbeck, University of London, GB  
slawso03@mail.bbk.ac.uk
This dataset contains details of 6,943 article processing charges (APCs) paid by 25 higher education 
institutions in the UK during 2014. The data was collected as part of Jisc Collections’ APC data collection 
project and has been released with permission from the institutions who provided the data. The data has 
been aggregated, normalized, and archived as a single CSV file. It will be of interest to those seeking to 
understand the scale of open access payments within the UK, and could be reused by combining it with 
subscription and APC expenditure data from other sources.
Keywords: library services; research publications; research outputs; data
Funding statement: This dataset was created as part of the author’s employment at Jisc Collections.
Lawson, S 2015 Article Processing Charges Paid by 25 UK Universities in 2014. Journal of 
Open Humanities Data, 1: e2, DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5334/johd.2
Lawson: Article Processing Charges Paid by 25 UK Universities in 2014Art. e2, p.  2 of 3 
Dataset Creators
Author
Stuart Lawson, Research Analyst, Jisc Collections – 
Designed the data collection and template, collected data, 
aggregated and cleaned data, authored the paper.
Data contributors
Bangor University, University of Bath, University 
of Birmingham, University of Bristol, University of 
Cambridge, Cranfield University, Durham University, 
University of Glasgow, Imperial College London, Lancaster 
University, University of Leicester, University of Liverpool, 
Loughborough University, LSHTM, Newcastle University, 
Plymouth University, University of Portsmouth, Queen Mary 
University of London, Royal Holloway University of London, 
University of Salford, University of Sheffield, University of 
Sussex, Swansea University, UCL, University of Warwick.
Language
N/A.
License
CC0.
Repository name
Figshare.
Repository location
http://figshare.com/
http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.1305596
Publication date
2015-02-11.
(4) Reuse potential
This data could be reused by combining it with APC 
expenditure data from other sources. The author is not 
aware of any comparable data being available from out-
side the EU. While some data is available from German 
institutions [7], the UK currently has the largest quantity 
available with over 40 UK higher education institutions, 
along with the Wellcome Trust, having now published 
at least some level of detail about their APC expenditure 
during 2013 and/or 2014 [5]. If this dataset is combined 
with others there may well be duplicate entries so this 
would need to be taken into consideration. Over time, it 
can be used as a benchmark against which to evaluate 
APC expenditure in future years as that data becomes 
available.
Information about the level of expenditure on journal 
subscriptions with some publishers is also available for 
the UK, so this can be combined to see the total subscrip-
tion and APC expenditure levels that some institutions 
have with some publishers [8]. The level of APC expendi-
ture compared to subscription expenditure is growing – 
up to 30% in some cases [9] – so this is an important 
area of continuing research if research funders and insti-
tutions are to monitor where their funds are going. Jisc 
Collections will repeat the data collection exercise each 
year for at least the next three years.
It is likely that extensive validation work on the dataset, 
such as checking that the information contained is correct, 
would lead to a number of alterations and corrections. For 
many of the fields it would only be possible for the institu-
tion or research funder to validate, but the bibliographic 
information could be made more accurate by using data 
from other sources. Due to time restraints, data was only 
normalized to be internally consistent and was not verified 
by checking primary sources. Therefore cross-checking it 
with sources such as CrossRef would lead to greater accu-
racy of the bibliographic fields.
Further analysis could reveal information about the 
extent of payments made to particular publishers and the 
average APC price paid to different publishers. It would 
also be possible to highlight relationships between indi-
vidual research funders and publishers, by seeing which 
publishers receive money from any given funder.
Competing Interests
SL was in paid employment by Jisc Collections as part of 
the data acquisition for this study.
References
1. RCUK 2015 RCUK Policy on Open Access [Internet]. 
London: RCUK; [cited 2015 Feb 16]. Available from: 
http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/research/openaccess/policy/
2. Wellcome Trust 2015 Open Access Policy [Internet]. 
London: Wellcome Trust; [cited 2015 Feb 16]. Available 
from: http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/About-us/Policy/
Policy-and-position-statements/WTD002766.htm
3. Willetts, D 2014 Progress review: implementing Finch 
report recommendations. [cited 2015 Feb 16]. Available 
from: http://www.researchinfonet.org/wp-content/
uploads/2013/02/BIS-Transparency-Letter-to-Janet-
Finch-One-Year-On-Response-January-2014.pdf
4. Jisc Collections 2015 APC data collection [Internet]. 
London: Jisc; [cited 2015 Feb 16]. Available from: 
https://www.jisc-collections.ac.uk/Jisc-Monitor/APC-
data-collection/
5. Figshare 2015 Article processing charges [Internet]. 
[cited 2015 Feb 16]. Available from: http://figshare.com/ 
articles/search?q=article+processing+charges&quick=1
6. Jisc Collections 2015 Jisc Banding model [Internet]. 
London: Jisc; [cited 2015 May 25]. Available from: https:// 
www.jisc-collections.ac.uk/Help-and-information/
JISC-Banding/
7. njahn82 2015 unibiAPC [GitHub repository] [Internet]. 
[cited 2015 Feb 16]. Available from: https://github.
com/njahn82/unibiAPC
8. Lawson, S and Meghreblian, B 2014 Journal subscrip-
tion expenditure of UK higher education institutions [v2; 
ref status: indexed]. F1000Research 2014, 3: 274. DOI: 
http://dx.doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.5706.2
9. Pinfield, S, Salter, J and Bath, P A 2015 The “total 
cost of publication” in a hybrid open-access environ-
ment: Institutional approaches to funding journal 
article-processing charges in combination with sub-
scriptions. Journal of the Association for Information 
Science and Technology (early online). DOI: http://
dx.doi.org/10.1002/asi.23446
Lawson: Article Processing Charges Paid by 25 UK Universities in 2014 Art. e2, p.  3 of 3 
How to cite this article: Lawson, S 2015 Article Processing Charges Paid by 25 UK Universities in 2014. Journal of 
Open Humanities Data 1:e2, DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5334/johd.2
Published: 29 September 2015
Copyright: © 2015 The Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons 
Attribution 3.0 Unported License (CC-BY 3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, 
provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/.
Journal of Open Humanities Data is a peer-reviewed open access journal published by Ubiquity 
Press OPEN ACCESS


Article Processing Charges Paid by 25 UK Universities in 2014

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Article Processing Charges Paid by 25 UK Universities in 2014

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