Report: Costs for Publishing an Article
March 6, 2013 Download PDF
Based on operating costs in 2012, the journal department of the Macrothink Institute worked out a statistic report to reflect the costs for publishing an article in Macrothink’s journals:
Direct costs related to single articles:
| Item | Amount | Notes |
| Labor costs | > 50.00 USD/article | This covers author services, peer-review, editing, publishing, and other direct costs. It is an average across all submissions. |
| Paypal fee | 3.50 USD/transaction | Most transactions are processed by Paypal. |
| CrossCheck/ iThenticate | 0.75 USD/article | We enjoy a group discount price. |
| DOI fee | 1.00 USD/DOI name | We assign a DOI name to each article. |
| Print & Delivery | 0.00 USD/article | We publish online only, so there are no printing or mailing fees. |
| Maintenance fee | 5.00 USD/article/year | This reflects the approximate amount, including labor costs, online hosting, and backup fees, needed for website maintenance. We expect this amount to decrease in the future. |
Indirect costs that cannot be allocated to single articles and so are applied using an average:
Office rent
Office equipments
Office expenses
Payroll for administrative staff
Accounting and legal fees
Bank charges
Trademark fees
Marketing and advertisement
Technical support
Website hosting, design, and backup: we employ servers in three locations, for security and safe backup.
Keep Costs Low
The executives and staffs always travel economy class for business trips. We do not rent a premium office, and we do not sponsor luxury conferences or festival parties. Our goal is to serve journal publishing and to support research as frugally as possible, as we are committed to the academic community.
We struggle to retain the lowest operation costs in the industry. Any recommendations for reducing costs are most welcome.