Situation of open access and APC payments in Colombia. An analysis model applicable to Latin America

Open access is fundamental to understanding scientific communication from the last three decades, especially in Latin America. Open-access growth has provoked dramatic changes in the business models of the publishing industry, mainly due to the golden route. Among those changes, the Article Processing Costs (APC) has emerged and consolidated thanks to the open movement and to research evaluation and incentives policies promoted by universities and governments. It is necessary to understand APC better and supply data and transparency on the APC payments. This article proposes a six-step methodology to analyze APC in any university, but using a sample of Colombian universities as a case study. The results show how the universities have been producing a higher share of open-access documents, but they have also faced rising expenditure on processing articles charged by publishers.