While open access journals provide readers with articles at no charge, there is growing concern about increasing article processing charges (APCs) that authors or research institutes pay to publish their work. This study examines the determinants of APC changes for 231 open access journals independently launched by two large publishers, namely, BMC (formerly BioMed Central) and Hindawi. The results indicate that most BMC journals raised their APCs between 2018 and 2020, while the charges for about half of Hindawi journals were lower in 2020 than in 2018. This study reveals that BMC raised the APCs for journals with higher citation scores, while Hindawi did not consider citation score as a factor in revising charges. Assuming that authors are insensitive to APCs when selecting a journal to submit their articles but are more likely to submit to a highly cited journal, BMC's strategy may increase the economic burden on authors and research institutes funding the publication.

中文翻译：

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对2018年至2020年间开放获取期刊的文章处理费用修订的分析

尽管开放获取期刊免费为读者提供文章，但人们越来越担心作者或研究机构为发表其作品而支付的文章处理费用（APC）。这项研究调查了由两家大型出版商BMC（以前称为BioMed Central）和Hindawi独立发行的231种开放获取期刊的APC变更的决定因素。结果表明，大多数BMC期刊在2018年至2020年之间提高了APC，而2020年，大约一半的Hindawi期刊的收费低于2018年。这项研究表明，BMC提高了具有较高引用分数的期刊的APC。不要将引用分数视为修改收费的因素。