Nicolas ClairisBased on a suggestion from Guillaume Sescousse, we wanted to use our WhereToPublish database (https://wheretopublish.github.io/) to check the relationship between article processing charges (APCs) and the "prestige" of the journal (measured with the H-index and the Scimago rank) as we expect that, especially for-profit journals, may increase the APCs in the journals with the highest IF not only to compensate for the higher number of submissions that they receive but also to maximize their profits.
Unsurprisingly, there is a strong correlation between APCs and H-index, and between APCs and Scimago rank for both for-profit journals and for non-profit (NP)+university press (UP) journals.
However, when comparing the correlation coefficients between For-profit and NP+UP journals, the tendency always goes in the direction of a higher correlation for journals that are For-Profit, but the difference was statistically significant only for the Scimago Rank (p<0.001) but not for the H-index (z = 0.3055, p-value = 0.3800) confirming that FP journals probably increase the APCs to maximize benefits.
Of course, since what most scientists maximize is the IF, it would be interesting to replicate this analysis replacing H-index and Scimago rank by the IF. I'm expecting that the difference will probably be even greater for journals that are for-profit in comparison with non-profit in that case.
Curious to hear your thoughts on that.
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