Open access: What price affordability?

"... Further aggravating the problem, it turns out that scholarly publishing does not operate like a classic market. For a number of reasons, no effective mechanisms for restraining prices have emerged [3]. In effect, scholarly publishers are as good as able to charge whatever they want for their journals. The upshot: Today even the wealthiest universities in the world can no longer afford to subscribe to all the journals their faculty need to do their work effectively [4], and the subscription model is now widely viewed as unsustainable so far as scholarly journal publishing is concerned. While the accessibility problem is clearly a consequence of the affordability problem (since access would not be an issue if research institutions could afford to subscribe to all the journals they needed), we should view them as separate issues, not least because solving one of the problems will not necessarily solve the other. It goes without saying that the affordability problem is most serious for researchers based in the developing world. Their institutions have never been able to afford more than a handful of journal subscriptions, and the more prices rise the fewer the number of journals they are able to subscribe to, and so the greater the accessibility problem becomes for them. What is the solution to these two problems? Open access advocates believe the answer is for researchers to either continue publishing in subscription journals, but make a copy of their papers freely available to all by depositing them in an OA repository (green OA), or to publish in a gold OA journal by paying an article-processing charge (APC) so that the publisher will make their work freely available for them. Not only will this solve the accessibility problem (since all research will become freely available on the Internet), OA advocates maintain, but it will also solve the affordability problem, not least because online publishing is much less costly than print publishing. But is it possible that while open access may solve the accessibility problem, it will fail to solve the affordability problem? In embracing OA publishing, for instance, traditional publishers are pricing their APCs not to reflect their true costs, but at a level that will enable them to migrate their journals to an OA environment without suffering any loss of revenue. And OA publishers are increasing their prices in response [5]. Currently it costs around $3,000 [6] per paper to publish in a subscription journal with an OA option (known as hybrid OA), and it can cost up to $2,885 [7] per paper to publish in an OA journal ..."