Highly selective journals incur costs of no more than about $1,000 (£734) for every paper they produce, claims a study by a former publishing industry executive.

In a peer-reviewed paper on the F1000 open access platform by Alexander Grossmann, who was publishing director at Wiley and managing director at Springer and is now professor of publishing management at Leipzig University of Applied Sciences, and Bjorn Brembs, professor of neurobiology at the University of Regensburg, it is claimed that the cost of publishing a paper in a conventional journal with a 50 per cent rejection rate ranges between $641 for a title that publishes fewer than 100 articles a year and $565 for those that publish 1,000 articles a year or more, even when all editorial duties are performed by in-house staff.

Publishing costs for prestigious journals with a rejection rate of about 90 per cent had higher costs, rising to $1,053 for titles that published 100 or fewer papers a year, or to $770 for those that published more than 1,000 articles a year.

“As currently most highly selective journals publish in the order of 800-900 research articles per year about $1,000 per article can be seen as an upper bound of total publication costs at such journals,” says the study.

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The estimates come amid ongoing negotiations between Elsevier, the world’s biggest scientific publisher, and UK universities, which are seeking a five-year transformative deal from January that is likely to significantly increase the volume of research papers that can be viewed freely.

Many of the talks will concern what should be considered a fair per-article average price for publishing open access papers as part of the transition away from subscription-based access; a transformative deal signed by German universities in January 2020 with SpringerNature, which will see about 13,000 articles a year published open access, is based on a publish-and-read fee of €2,750 (£2,023) for each paper.

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However, the world’s most prestigious titles intend to charge significantly more, with Nature putting the cost of per-article publication ������€9,500 and the Elsevier-owned Cell ���󲹰������Բ���£7,800.

Those figures are seven to eight times more than the paper’s estimate of publication costs, which is based on cost data obtained from publishers, including eLife and Frontiers, as well as estimates of staff and overhead costs, which assumed that each submitted manuscript required seven and a half hours of an in-house editorial staff member’s time.

However, it did exclude the cost of sales, management and “often very significant paywall costs”, as well as the costs of innovation, branding, advertising and government lobbying, which it said would be unnecessary or, at least, severely reduced if a journal were to become open access.

“Taking a ballpark cost figure of $600 for a scholarly article with full editorial services and comparing it to the low end of the average price estimate for a subscription article of about $4,000, it becomes clear that publication costs only cover 15 per cent of the subscription price,” it claims.

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A Springer Nature spokesman said the study failed to take account of the full costs of the peer review process, which included quality assurance checks on more than 1.4 million article submissions “even if they don’t eventually end up being published with us.”

“For the authors of the 370,000 articles we published, our investment continues to ensure they are properly supported through the review process, and that their work when published is the best it possibly can be, in the most up to date formats with all the right permissions in place,” he said.

It also failed to consider other costs, including “services that a publisher provides to ensure that an author’s research can be discovered, accessed, understood, used, reused and shared on state of the art platforms by all relevant global audiences after publication”.

“This is such a significant omission, we would caution against relying on this limited view of article cost,” the spokesman concluded.

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jack.grove@timeshighereducation.com