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opencost-de / opencost

openCost data formats, documentation and examples
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How to model service fees? #68

Open aw-bib opened 1 week ago

aw-bib commented 1 week ago

Some transformative contracts are handled by a service agency that will charge for their services. How should these fees be modelled correctly?

The German DEAL contracts may serve as an example for the intricacies one might encounter.

In principle, the service fee is a fixed amount to be paid per article which would lead to add service fees on the article level and treat them like any other payment fee that arises in the context of APC governed Gold Open Access. In this sense it is very similar to a service fee charged by a credit card company.

However, in DEAL the service fee is not invoiced with the article. Instead there are yearly invoices for the service fee that are issued towards the end of the year and refer to the number of articles in the year before. (IOW fees for [2024-01-01 .. 2024-12-31] are calculated based on the articles published in 2023.) This would lead to a model where the service fee should be stored on the contract level as another cost type to be added on the contract years, as it is actually completely unrelated to the articles as such. The number of articles is just some factor in the formula.

aw-bib commented 1 week ago

It might be that we need a term on both entities. Contracts as well as articles to accommodate for whatever arises.