bjoern.brembs.blog » How gold open access may make things worse

"Due to ongoing discussions on various (social) media, this is a mash-up of several previous posts on the strategy of ‘flipping’ our current >30k subscription journals to an author-financed open access corporate business model. I consider this version of ‘gold’ OA a looming threat that may deteriorate the situation beyond the abysmal state scholarly publishing is in right now. Yes, you read that right: it can get worse than it is today. What would be worse? Universal gold open access – that is, every publisher charges the authors what they want for making the articles publicly accessible. Take the case of Emerald, a publisher which recently raised their article processing charges (APCs) by a whopping 70%. When asked for the reason for their price-hike, they essentially answered 'because we can' ..."