From an institutional perspective an APC invoice should enable the account administrator to understand the items that have been billed. In case of a central agreement between a publisher and an institution it is very important to provide the details corresponding with the agreement. For example, if it was agreed upon the coverage of APCs for authors with a specific authorship like “corresponding author” it is necessary to state the authorship in an invoice.
The same goes for prices that might change during submission and publication of a paper and then differ from the agreed price. The valid price of an APC should be the one at the time of submission, which means that publishers should be able to track the submission price.
Moreover public institutions like libraries must meet several formal requirements in order to process invoices, so details like VAT numbers and currency are absolutely necessary for a smooth workflow.
Pre-invoice statement – Some publishers might decide to issue a pre-invoice statement prior to the final invoice. It usually includes publishing data and needs final approval and/ or revisions from institution. The purpose of document is to reconcile and verify billed items.
Data Items of an APC Invoice
General invoice items:
- Billing address
- Customer ID
- Invoice no
- Invoice date
- Currency
- Publisher’s VAT ID
- Customer’s VAT ID
APC specifics:
- Date of submission & date of publication- necessary information in the case of change in prices in order to identify the valid price
- Journal abbreviation
- Journal title
- DOI
- Article title
- Affiliated author- full name and authorship status (e.g. corresponding/ senior/ first author) of the author who is entiteled to an institution’s APC fund
- Full name of affiliation of the entiteled author
- Article net price
Optional, if existing:
- Journal type
- Journal category
- Price category
- Page price
- Discount
This table shall be provided both in a machine readable format (preferably CSV) and in a human readable format.