The Tetrahedron test case

"The truth is that no one knows how much costs would be in a counterfactual open-access world with competitive APC fees. The kinds of calculations in Davis’s post (and this one and other previous work) are a kind of silly game. But given that the highest APC for an OA journal ($2,900 for PLoS Biology) is far less than the average revenue per article for a subscription journal ($5,000 according to the Scholarly Publishing Roundtable), it seems extraordinarily unlikely that the overall costs would be higher. And we’d drop all of the access restrictions as a nice side effect. Seems like a bargain to me. But the most important point is that the idea behind COPE and the HOPE fund is not to save an individual institution money. If in the long term COPE has the intended effect of shifting journals such as Tetrahedron to an OA model within a journal ecology based on an efficient market — a situation that we manifestly do not now have — and if under those conditions Harvard ends up paying a bit more, well, then the market has spoken...."