95 urn:lsid:arphahub.com:pub:02939EE0-163D-59B9-A896-E0B63CFEE862 European Science Editing ESE 0258-3127 2518-3354 European Association of Science Editors (EASE) 10.3897/ese.2020.e54523 54523 Original Article Altmetrics Bibliometrics Databases Open access Reporting statistics Scientific production Exploring the relationship between journal indexing and article processing charges of journals published by MDPI, the Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute Okagbue Hilary I hilary.okagbue@covenantuniversity.edu.ng https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3779-9763 1 Teixeira da Silva Jaime 2 Anake Timothy 1 Covenant University, Ota, Nigeria Covenant University Ota Nigeria Independent Researcher, Kagawa-ken, Japan Independent Researcher Kagawa-ken Japan

Corresponding author: Hilary I Okagbue (hilary.okagbue@covenantuniversity.edu.ng).

Academic editor: Hrvoje Jakovac

 2020 24 12 2020 46 DCB1E0CC-D4D0-5A2C-8E86-2581A2D38037 20 05 2020 01 09 2020 Hilary I Okagbue, Jaime Teixeira da Silva, Timothy Anake This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

The Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute (MDPI) is a prominent open access (OA) publisher that uses article processing charges (APCs) as its business model. Our objective was to determine the association between the APCs levied by MDPI journals and 1) their inclusion in Scopus and Web of Science databases or 2) their stature, as represented by their CiteScore (Elsevier's Scopus) and Impact Factor (awarded by Clarivate Analytics). Among the 227 journals published by MDPI, 51 had both IF and CiteScore; 107, only a CiteScore; and 84, neither IF nor CiteScore. The charges levied by the journals varied widely, from 0 to CHF 2000 (Swiss francs), the most frequent figure (159 journals) being CHF 1000, or about €930. The amount of APCs was found to be correlated to IF (R² = 0.64; p <0.001; 107 journals) and also to CiteScore (R² = 0.619; p <0.001; 53 journals). The charges levied by journals that had both IF and CiteScore were significantly higher than those charged by journals with neither IF nor CiteScore (p <0.05). The charges were also correlated to the age of the journal: the more recently launched journals charged less than the older journals did.