Rising APC Costs Push Global South Researchers to Demand More Than Waivers

Article processing charges were conceived as a bridge. A researcher, a funder, or an institution would pay a publisher once, and the resulting article would be free for every reader. Twenty years on, the bridge has become a toll road, and the toll rises each year. No region feels this more sharply than the Global South, where waivers that were designed as a safeguard have turned into a central point of political contest.

The latest phase of that contest is less about whether waivers exist than about what they are for. Publishers point to generous discount schedules. Researchers and library consortia from Latin America, Africa, South Asia and the Middle East answer that a waiver from an inequitable price is not the same as an equitable pricing model. Both statements can be true at once, and the difference between them now shapes negotiating tables in several regions.

Waiver programmes were built for access, not for authorship

The current waiver architecture grew from reading access, not publication. In 2002, the World Health Organization and major publishers set up HINARI, a programme offering free or low-cost reading access to biomedical journals for institutions in low-income countries. HINARI became one of five Research4Life programmes, alongside AGORA, OARE, ARDI and GOALI, covering health, agriculture, environment, development and law. Eligibility rests on country income classifications and institutional status.

When article processing charges spread, publishers borrowed the same logic. Authors from the lowest-income countries might receive a full waiver; authors from lower-middle-income countries might receive a partial discount. The schedules differ by publisher, by journal, by corresponding author and by whether the APC is for a fully open access journal or a hybrid journal. Some publishers apply waivers automatically, others only after an application, and a third group leaves the decision to individual editors or society partners.

It does not follow, however, that a system built for reading access transfers cleanly to authorship. Reading access is granted to an institution; publication is an individual act tied to a corresponding author and a research budget. A university can register for HINARI once. An author must identify a waiver pathway for each submission, often before the research has been accepted and often without knowing whether the waiver will be approved.

What the rising APC means in practice

Open access publishing has moved from a professional commitment to a large revenue line for commercial publishers. Fully open access journals list fees at several thousand dollars, with selective biomedical and high-volume titles publishing APCs above $5,000 and a smaller tier exceeding $9,000 before tax. Hybrid journals, which charge libraries for subscriptions and authors an additional APC for individual articles, can be higher still. The Directory of Open Access Journals records APC information for many indexed titles, and the range is wide enough to defeat simple averages.

For a senior scientist in Zurich or Boston, a $3,000 APC may be an administrative annoyance covered by a grant line. For a researcher in Nigeria, Pakistan or Bolivia, the same fee can exceed several months of salary, which is why the waiver question is so consequential and why it produces sharply different answers depending on the institution. Public universities in lower-middle-income countries rarely hold the dedicated APC budgets that funders in high-income countries now expect.

The Research4Life eligibility framework remains the reference point for most waiver policies, but it was developed around access programmes, not around the full cost of authorship. A country can pass from low-income to lower-middle-income status and lose the full waiver precisely as its researchers gain the capacity to publish more. The threshold effect is widely acknowledged among publishing staff, yet it persists because alternatives require publishers to build country-level pricing, something few are willing to publish.

What waiver activism is actually asking for

Advocacy from the Global South has moved beyond a simple request for more generous discounts. Latin American organisations have spent a generation arguing that the region built its own open access infrastructure, in SciELO and Redalyc, without APCs. The AmeliCA initiative, supported through UNESCO and regional partners, makes the same case for community-owned publishing. African library and research associations have repeatedly told publishers that waivers do not help local journals, which receive no APC income and cannot afford the indexing and editorial systems that attract submissions.

Four demands recur in open letters and position papers from the Global South. One, waivers should be automatic and based on corresponding author, not on an application that many early-career researchers do not know exists. Two, publishers should publish their APC price lists and waiver approval rates, including the percentage of requests granted and the average decision time. Three, country income classification should not be the only instrument; institutional capacity, historical research infrastructure and the journal's own financial model should also be considered. Four, funders should treat APCs as research costs and attach them to grants, rather than leaving authors to negotiate individually.

Those demands have begun to enter policy. India's One Nation One Subscription programme expanded reading access across public universities, but the APC question remained a separate negotiation, a distinction Indian research administrators have described as incomplete rather than irrelevant. In Europe, the Plan S price transparency service pushed publishers toward public price lists, yet transparent prices are not necessarily affordable prices, as several Latin American consortia noted in response.

The clearest institutional alternative, diamond open access, has a well-documented funding problem of its own, which an earlier report on diamond journals in Europe traced through small editorial budgets and volunteer labour. That the alternative model is fragile does not make the APC model stronger. It means the sector is defending two underfunded systems while a third model, the commercial APC, extracts the largest margins from the countries least positioned to pay them.

The publisher position, stated fairly

Commercial publishers and some society publishers answer that APCs reflect the cost of running peer review, editorial management, production, indexing, marketing and platforms, and that authors who cannot pay are already exempt in most cases. They note that the number of fully waived papers from low-income countries remains small, and that waiver administration adds cost that would otherwise appear in higher list prices for everyone. They also point out that some institutions in middle-income countries have strong research programmes, and that universal APC exemption would shift the burden to subscribing institutions in Europe and North America through higher read-and-publish fees.

That argument has merit as a description of current accounting. It does not, however, explain why APC list prices have risen faster than general publication costs, nor why price differences between journals with similar editorial models run into multiples rather than percentages. The cOAlition S group has pressed for price transparency precisely because the cost side remains opaque. Without published cost data, publishers can claim necessity while researchers can only observe the invoice, and that asymmetry is itself a policy failure.

There is also a more subtle problem. Waivers are often presented as generosity, but they function as price discrimination in the classical economic sense. A publisher can maintain a high list price for funders in wealthy countries while offering selected authors a lower or zero price. If waivers were fully funded rather than foregone revenue, the system might be stable. As foregone revenue, they create an internal incentive to grant as few as possible and to market the schedule as evidence of equity at the same time.

Where the pressure is building

The most consequential negotiations are no longer only between authors and publishers. Library consortia, funders and ministries are beginning to attach APC conditions to national contracts. South Africa, which has some of the most developed transformative agreements on the continent, has seen universities use read-and-publish deals to cover some APCs, but those deals cover at most a subset of journals and tend to favour corresponding authors at well-resourced institutions. Researchers outside the big consortia continue to rely on waivers, and the disparity has become a topic of quiet debate within South African university senates.

Indonesia, Brazil and Mexico have taken different routes. Brazil's public journals are overwhelmingly diamond open access and operated by universities, which insulates them from APC inflation but leaves them dependent on irregular institutional budgets. Indonesian universities have signed several read-and-publish agreements, though the APC portion is often capped, which leaves corresponding authors with sizeable residual charges. Mexican research institutions lean on repository-based green open access, but repository deposit does not satisfy the publication fee demands of journals that want immediate gold open access.

In each case, the policy tool does not match the problem. A waiver is a concession attached to a price. A national license is a purchase attached to a publisher. A repository mandate is a condition attached to an institution. None of them, on its own, changes the underlying APC price path. That may be why advocacy has begun to converge on a single request: publish the actual APC price schedule, including waivers, for every journal, and link it to country income in a machine-readable format.

• Automatic waiver decisions at submission, with no separate form for authors from eligible countries.
• Annual public reporting of APC revenue, waiver approvals and median decision times by publisher.
• Reduced APCs for lower-middle-income countries that scale gradually rather than cutting off at a fixed threshold.
• Funder policies that allow APC costs to be charged directly to grants without sub-recipient overhead rules.

The precedent being set now

Scholarly publishing has a long memory, but a short planning horizon. Each price increase is presented as an operational adjustment, and each waiver expansion is presented as a concession. Over time, those adjustments accumulate into policy. The danger for the Global South is that the current system will be remembered as equitable simply because waivers existed, when the more accurate record is that researchers in low- and middle-income countries were asked to accept a pricing model designed elsewhere and then thanked for receiving discounts on it.

A fairer question is whether journal publishing can be priced in a way that treats countries with different research budgets as part of the same scholarly community. That question has an answer in some regions. Latin America has shown that publicly funded journals can operate at high editorial standards without charging authors. Whether such models can scale under the pressure of global rankings and research evaluation is another matter, and one that cOAlition S, UNESCO and the Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association are now debating through proposals to fund diamond open access infrastructure. The precedent set today will decide whether the next generation of researchers in Accra, Karachi and Bogotá enters the system as authors with a place at the table or as applicants for permission to pay less.

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