arXiv subjects

Stefanie Haustein

Publications and source records attributed to Stefanie Haustein.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Estimating global article processing charges paid to 14 publishers for open access between 2019 and 2025

This study presents estimates of the global expenditure on article processing charges (APCs) paid to 14 publishers for open access (OA) between 2019 and 2025. APCs are charged for publishing in fully OA journals (gold) and making individual articles OA in subscription journals (hybrid), but how much is paid, and for which articles, is not publicly known. We therefore curated an open dataset of publicly listed APC prices from 14 academic publishers (ACS, CUP, De Gruyter, EDP, Elsevier, Frontiers, IEEE, IOP, MDPI, OUP, PLOS, Sage, Springer Nature, and Wiley) and combined it with counts of OA articles from OpenAlex. We estimate that \$15.08 billion (in 2025 USD) was spent globally on APCs between 2019 and 2025. Adjusted for inflation, annual spending quadrupled from \$0.9 billion in 2019 to \$3.7 billion in 2025, with >85% concentrated among a few large publishers. Hybrid OA fees exceed gold fees, and the median fee paid is higher than the median price listed for both. Our approach addresses major limitations in previous efforts to estimate APC spending, offering much-needed insight into an opaque aspect of scholarly publishing, especially as transformative agreements make it more challenging to understand the costs of publishing OA.

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arXiv2026

A dataset of article processing charges from 14 scholarly publishers, 2019-2025

This paper introduces a dataset of APCs produced from the price lists of 14 large scholarly publishers between 2019 and 2025. APC price lists were downloaded from publisher websites each year as well as via Wayback Machine snapshots to retrieve fees per journal per year. The dataset includes journal metadata, APC collection method, and annual APC price list information in several currencies (USD, EUR, GBP, CHF, JPY, CAD, AUD) for 12,540 unique journals and 69,856 journal-year combinations. The dataset was generated to allow for more precise analysis of APCs and can support library collection development and scientometric analysis estimating APCs paid in gold and hybrid OA journals.

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arXiv2026

When Editors Revolt: Characterizing Journal Declarations of Independence

When editorial boards resign from their journals and publishers and declare their independence, two competing journals can result: the original journal under a new editorial board (a "zombie" journal), and a new journal established by the departing editors (a "breakaway"). The bibliometric community saw such an event when the board of Journal of Informetrics left Elsevier to found Quantitative Science Studies. We analyzed 39 breakaway-zombie journal pairs that have formed since 1989 and their declarations of independence to understand why and how they happen. Results show that declarations of independence were motivated by concerns related to governance and business model and overwhelmingly happened at journals owned by the Big Five publishers. Breakaway editors tended to found new journals at smaller publishers and adopt diamond publishing models. These findings suggest that dissatisfaction with commercial publishing models is growing, and that community-led alternatives can motivate change.

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arXiv2025

The Drain of Scientific Publishing

The domination of scientific publishing in the Global North by major commercial publishers is harmful to science. We need the most powerful members of the research community, funders, governments and Universities, to lead the drive to re-communalise publishing to serve science not the market.

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arXiv2024

Estimating global article processing charges paid to six publishers for open access between 2019 and 2023

This study presents estimates of the global expenditure on article processing charges (APCs) paid to six publishers for open access between 2019 and 2023. APCs are fees charged for publishing in some fully open access journals (gold) and in subscription journals to make individual articles open access (hybrid). There is currently no way to systematically track institutional, national or global expenses for open access publishing due to a lack of transparency in APC prices, what articles they are paid for, or who pays them. We therefore curated and used an open dataset of annual APC list prices from Elsevier, Frontiers, MDPI, PLOS, Springer Nature, and Wiley in combination with the number of open access articles from these publishers indexed by OpenAlex to estimate that, globally, a total of \$8.349 billion (\$8.968 billion in 2023 US dollars) were spent on APCs between 2019 and 2023. We estimate that in 2023 MDPI (\$681.6 million), Elsevier (\$582.8 million) and Springer Nature (\$546.6) generated the most revenue with APCs. After adjusting for inflation, we also show that annual spending almost tripled from \$910.3 million in 2019 to \$2.538 billion in 2023, that hybrid exceed gold fees, and that the median APCs paid are higher than the median listed fees for both gold and hybrid. Our approach addresses major limitations in previous efforts to estimate APCs paid and offers much needed insight into an otherwise opaque aspect of the business of scholarly publishing. We call upon publishers to be more transparent about OA fees.

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arXiv2024

An open dataset of article processing charges from six large scholarly publishers (2019-2023)

This paper introduces a dataset of article processing charges (APCs) produced from the price lists of six large scholarly publishers - Elsevier, Frontiers, PLOS, MDPI, Springer Nature and Wiley - between 2019 and 2023. APC price lists were downloaded from publisher websites each year as well as via Wayback Machine snapshots to retrieve fees per journal per year. The dataset includes journal metadata, APC collection method, and annual APC price list information in several currencies (USD, EUR, GBP, CHF, JPY, CAD) for 8,712 unique journals and 36,618 journal-year combinations. The dataset was generated to allow for more precise analysis of APCs and can support library collection development and scientometric analysis estimating APCs paid in gold and hybrid OA journals.

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arXiv2024

An analysis of the suitability of OpenAlex for bibliometric analyses

Scopus and the Web of Science have been the foundation for research in the science of science even though these traditional databases systematically underrepresent certain disciplines and world regions. In response, new inclusive databases, notably OpenAlex, have emerged. While many studies have begun using OpenAlex as a data source, few critically assess its limitations. This study, conducted in collaboration with the OpenAlex team, addresses this gap by comparing OpenAlex to Scopus across a number of dimensions. The analysis concludes that OpenAlex is a superset of Scopus and can be a reliable alternative for some analyses, particularly at the country level. Despite this, issues of metadata accuracy and completeness show that additional research is needed to fully comprehend and address OpenAlex's limitations. Doing so will be necessary to confidently use OpenAlex across a wider set of analyses, including those that are not at all possible with more constrained databases.

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arXiv2020

How much research shared on Facebook happens outside of public pages and groups? A comparison of public and private online activity around PLOS ONE papers

Despite its undisputed position as the biggest social media platform, Facebook has never entered the main stage of altmetrics research. In this study, we argue that the lack of attention by altmetrics researchers is due, in part, to the challenges in collecting Facebook data regarding activity that takes place outside of public pages and groups. We present a new method of collecting aggregate counts of shares, reactions, and comments across the platform-including users' personal timelines-and use it to gather data for all articles published between 2015 to 2017 in the journal PLOS ONE. We compare the gathered data with altmetrics collected and aggregated by Altmetric. The results show that 58.7% of papers shared on Facebook happen outside of public spaces and that, when collecting all shares, the volume of activity approximates patterns of engagement previously only observed for Twitter. Both results suggest that the role and impact of Facebook as a medium for science and scholarly communication has been underestimated. Furthermore, they emphasise the importance of openness and transparency around the collection and aggregation of altmetrics.

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arXiv2018

Scholarly Twitter metrics

Twitter has arguably been the most popular among the data sources that form the basis of so-called altmetrics. Tweets to scholarly documents have been heralded as both early indicators of citations as well as measures of societal impact. This chapter provides an overview of Twitter activity as the basis for scholarly metrics from a critical point of view and equally describes the potential and limitations of scholarly Twitter metrics. By reviewing the literature on Twitter in scholarly communication and analyzing 24 million tweets linking to scholarly documents, it aims to provide a basic understanding of what tweets can and cannot measure in the context of research evaluation. Going beyond the limited explanatory power of low correlations between tweets and citations, this chapter considers what types of scholarly documents are popular on Twitter, and how, when and by whom they are diffused in order to understand what tweets to scholarly documents measure. Although this chapter is not able to solve the problems associated with the creation of meaningful metrics from social media, it highlights particular issues and aims to provide the basis for advanced scholarly Twitter metrics.

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arXiv2017

On the relationships between bibliographic characteristics of scientific documents and citation and Mendeley readership counts: A large-scale analysis of Web of Science publications

In this paper we present a first large-scale analysis of the relationship between Mendeley readership and citation counts with particular documents bibliographic characteristics. A data set of 1.3 million publications from different fields published in journals covered by the Web of Science (WoS) has been analyzed. This work reveals that document types that are often excluded from citation analysis due to their lower citation values, like editorial materials, letters, or news items, are strongly covered and saved in Mendeley, suggesting that Mendeley readership can reliably inform the analysis of these document types. Findings show that collaborative papers are frequently saved in Mendeley, which is similar to what is observed for citations. The relationship between readership and the length of titles and number of pages, however, is weaker than for the same relationship observed for citations. The analysis of different disciplines also points to different patterns in the relationship between several document characteristics, readership, and citation counts. Overall, results highlight that although disciplinary differences exist, readership counts are related to similar bibliographic characteristics as those related to citation counts, reinforcing the idea that Mendeley readership and citations capture a similar concept of impact, although they cannot be considered as equivalent indicators.

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arXiv2017

What makes papers visible on social media? An analysis of various document characteristics

In this study we have investigated the relationship between different document characteristics and the number of Mendeley readership counts, tweets, Facebook posts, mentions in blogs and mainstream media for 1.3 million papers published in journals covered by the Web of Science (WoS). It aims to demonstrate that how factors affecting various social media-based indicators differ from those influencing citations and which document types are more popular across different platforms. Our results highlight the heterogeneous nature of altmetrics, which encompasses different types of uses and user groups engaging with research on social media.

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arXiv2016

Scholarly use of social media and altmetrics: a review of the literature

Social media has become integrated into the fabric of the scholarly communication system in fundamental ways: principally through scholarly use of social media platforms and the promotion of new indicators on the basis of interactions with these platforms. Research and scholarship in this area has accelerated since the coining and subsequent advocacy for altmetrics -- that is, research indicators based on social media activity. This review provides an extensive account of the state-of-the art in both scholarly use of social media and altmetrics. The review consists of two main parts: the first examines the use of social media in academia, examining the various functions these platforms have in the scholarly communication process and the factors that affect this use. The second part reviews empirical studies of altmetrics, discussing the various interpretations of altmetrics, data collection and methodological limitations, and differences according to platform. The review ends with a critical discussion of the implications of this transformation in the scholarly communication system.

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arXiv2016

Grand challenges in altmetrics: heterogeneity, data quality and dependencies

As uptake among researchers is constantly increasing, social media are finding their way into scholarly communication and, under the umbrella term altmetrics, were introduced to research evaluation. Fueled by technological possibilities and an increasing demand to demonstrate impact beyond the scientific community, altmetrics received great attention as potential democratizers of the scientific reward system and indicators of societal impact. This paper focuses on current challenges of altmetrics. Heterogeneity, data quality and particular dependencies are identified as the three major issues and discussed in detail with a particular emphasis on past developments in bibliometrics. The heterogeneity of altmetrics mirrors the diversity of the types of underlying acts, most of which take place on social media platforms. This heterogeneity has made it difficult to establish a common definition or conceptual framework. Data quality issues become apparent in the lack of accuracy, consistency and replicability of various altmetrics, which is largely affected by the dynamic nature of social media events. It is further highlighted that altmetrics are shaped by technical possibilities and depend particularly on the availability of APIs and DOIs, are strongly dependent on data providers and aggregators, and potentially influenced by technical affordances of underlying platforms.

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arXiv2015

Adapting sentiment analysis for tweets linking to scientific papers

In the context of altmetrics, tweets have been discussed as potential indicators of immediate and broader societal impact of scientific documents. However, it is not yet clear to what extent Twitter captures actual research impact. A small case study (Thelwall et al., 2013b) suggests that tweets to journal articles neither comment on nor express any sentiments towards the publication, which suggests that tweets merely disseminate bibliographic information, often even automatically. This study analyses the sentiments of tweets for a large representative set of scientific papers by specifically adapting different methods to academic articles distributed on Twitter. Results will help to improve the understanding of Twitter's role in scholarly communication and the meaning of tweets as impact metrics.

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arXiv2015

Influence of study type on Twitter activity for medical research papers

Twitter has been identified as one of the most popular and promising altmetrics data sources, as it possibly reflects a broader use of research articles by the general public. Several factors, such as document age, scientific discipline, number of authors and document type, have been shown to affect the number of tweets received by scientific documents. The particular meaning of tweets mentioning scholarly papers is, however, not entirely understood and their validity as impact indicators debatable. This study contributes to the understanding of factors influencing Twitter popularity of medical papers investigating differences between medical study types. 162,830 documents indexed in Embase to a medical study type have been analysed for the study type specific tweet frequency. Meta-analyses, systematic reviews and clinical trials were found to be tweeted substantially more frequently than other study types, while all basic research received less attention than the average. The findings correspond well with clinical evidence hierarchies. It is suggested that interest from laymen and patients may be a factor in the observed effects.

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arXiv2015

When is an article actually published? An analysis of online availability, publication, and indexation dates

With the acceleration of scholarly communication in the digital era, the publication year is no longer a sufficient level of time aggregation for bibliometric and social media indicators. Papers are increasingly cited before they have been officially published in a journal issue and mentioned on Twitter within days of online availability. In order to find a suitable proxy for the day of online publication allowing for the computation of more accurate benchmarks and fine-grained citation and social media event windows, various dates are compared for a set of 58,896 papers published by Nature Publishing Group, PLOS, Springer and Wiley-Blackwell in 2012. Dates include the online date provided by the publishers, the month of the journal issue, the Web of Science indexing date, the date of the first tweet mentioning the paper as well as the Altmetric.com publication and first-seen dates. Comparing these dates, the analysis reveals that large differences exist between publishers, leading to the conclusion that more transparency and standardization is needed in the reporting of publication dates. The date on which the fixed journal article (Version of Record) is first made available on the publisher's website is proposed as a consistent definition of the online date.

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arXiv2015

Social media in scholarly communication

Social media metrics - commonly coined as "altmetrics" - have been heralded as great democratizers of science, providing broader and timelier indicators of impact than citations. These metrics come from a range of sources, including Twitter, blogs, social reference managers, post-publication peer review, and other social media platforms. Social media metrics have begun to be used as indicators of scientific impact, yet the theoretical foundation, empirical validity, and extent of use of platforms underlying these metrics lack thorough treatment in the literature. This editorial provides an overview of terminology and definitions of altmetrics and summarizes current research regarding social media use in academia, social media metrics as well as data reliability and validity. The papers of the special issue are introduced.

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arXiv2015

Interpreting "altmetrics": viewing acts on social media through the lens of citation and social theories

More than 30 years after Cronin's seminal paper on "the need for a theory of citing" (Cronin, 1981), the metrics community is once again in need of a new theory, this time one for so-called "altmetrics". Altmetrics, short for alternative (to citation) metrics -- and as such a misnomer -- refers to a new group of metrics based (largely) on social media events relating to scholarly communication. As current definitions of altmetrics are shaped and limited by active platforms, technical possibilities, and business models of aggregators such as Altmetric.com, ImpactStory, PLOS, and Plum Analytics, and as such constantly changing, this work refrains from defining an umbrella term for these very heterogeneous new metrics. Instead a framework is presented that describes acts leading to (online) events on which the metrics are based. These activities occur in the context of social media, such as discussing on Twitter or saving to Mendeley, as well as downloading and citing. The framework groups various types of acts into three categories -- accessing, appraising, and applying -- and provides examples of actions that lead to visibility and traceability online. To improve the understanding of the acts, which result in online events from which metrics are collected, select citation and social theories are used to interpret the phenomena being measured. Citation theories are used because the new metrics based on these events are supposed to replace or complement citations as indicators of impact. Social theories, on the other hand, are discussed because there is an inherent social aspect to the measurements.

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