The report concludes that universities belonging to Consorcio Madroño have paid approximately 1,364,460 euros for this chapter in 2017.

Consorcio Madroño has carried out an analysis of its open publication costs during 2017, which concludes that in that year it paid the different publishers 1,364,460.67 euros for this concept, with an average APC of 1,722.80 euros. Furthermore, these data have been segregated by each of its member universities. This analysis follows the CRUE recommendations to Open Science regarding the quantification of open science.

The APC (Article processing charge) is the amount that a scientific publisher sometimes charges researchers to publish an open article in an open or hybrid journal. These amounts are mostly assumed in a decentralized way, that is, they are billed under the different research projects, so there is usually no centralized registry that quantifies them. However, it is important to have the aggregated data in order to obtain a realistic and complete approximation of the cost of open publication of the different institutions to which the researchers are attached.

The current and future trends in the typology of scientific journal agreements incorporate among their characteristics the centralized payment of publication costs together with subscriptions (transformative or read & publish agreements), therefore the relevance of such information. The analysis of Consorcio Madroño is documented in a report that also details the methodology, and which can be downloaded here. This methodology and the starting data are based on a similar analysis previously carried out by the Galician university library consortium, Bugalicia.

Likewise, it is planned to repeat this analysis of the Madroño Consortium for the following years, so that it can be completed with the corresponding trend studies.