The Cost of Open-Access Publishing in an Engineering Academic Community: A Study of Zagreb Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing

Since the early 1990s, open access (OA) scholarly publishing has become widespread in the international scientific community. Although there are numerous benefits of OA publishing, researchers experience a number of disadvantages related to the transition to the OA model. Article processing charges (APCs) paid by authors/institutions have become a key mechanism for funding full OA (the gold OA model). This paper addresses the issue of OA publication costs and attempts to find out what financial resources have been used by researchers at the University of Zagreb, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing for publishing in gold OA journals over the last five years. The published OA articles indexed in the Web of Science Core Collection for the period from 2016 to 2020 were analysed. A quantitative analysis of Journal Citation Reports metrics for 163 journals was conducted to identify a relationship between APCs and journal rankings. In addition, a detailed study of gold OA articles was carried out by examining the websites of 31 publishers and identifying APCs for 64 journals. Funding and collaboration models were extracted for 174 gold OA articles as they provide insight into the extent of national funding in relation to financing based on international collaboration. Finally, a calculation of invested funds over the last five years is presented.