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 consideration. And in setting APCs, publishers will take account of the levels already set in the open access market as well as their current cost base and their status and reputation. One option could be to make research articles open access (funded by APCs), but to charge for access to the editorial content, reviews and so on. That is the basis on which some major journals such as the British Medical Journal already operate.

7.4. Among the large open access publishers, APCs for journals published by PLoS for 2011-12 range from $2,900 for PLos Medicine and PLoS Biology to $1,350 for the ‘repository’ journal PLoS One; and APCs for journals published by BioMedCentral range from $630 to $2,620. For the Hindawi Publishing Corporation, APCs range from $300 to $1500. The high-status journals published in hybrid format by Cell Press, on the other hand, charge an APC of $5,000 for articles published on open access terms.

7.5. The average level of APCs paid by the Wellcome Trust under its open access policy in the first three months of 2011 was £1,422; and the University of Nottingham paid on average £1,216 in the academic year 2010-11. How sustainable such averages would be if open access were to become more widespread among journals with high rejection rates, as well as in the humanities and social sciences, is not clear. There could be upward pressure on prices as such journals adopt an open access option; but on the other hand market competition could keep APCs low. Despite this uncertainty about the future, the evidence to date indicates that in the current market place it is possible for at least some open access journals to operate on a financially-sustainable basis.

7.6. Hence it is not surprising that a number of publishers of major journals, including learned societies such as the Institute of Physics, have already established open access journals, or moved to a hybrid model for at least some of their publications. Few have established fully open access journals as yet, however, in the humanities and social sciences; and take-up of the open access option in hybrid journals in those disciplines has been very low. Indeed, a report on the journals published by a number of leading societies in the humanities and social sciences in the US found that factors including the rates of publication and of rejection of submitted manuscripts, the length of articles, and the large amounts of material—such as book reviews—that would not attract an APC, meant that a move to fully open access journals would be unsustainable: the level of APCs would be too high, and it was not clear whether funds would be available to meet them.

7.7. Recent analysis of some leading social science journals published by learned societies in the UK leads to similar conclusions, especially where—as is common with many of the journals published by societies—a large proportion of