Are open access fees a good use of tax payers money?

Butler et al. (2023) reported that five large commercial publishers (Elsevier, Sage, Springer-Nature, Taylor & Francis and Wiley) received $1.06 billion in publication fees between 2015 and 2018. Another three publishers were mentioned (Frontiers, MDPI and PLOS), but were not analyzed. The revenue was underestimated and the number of open access (OA) articles increased over the period of study. The five publishers analyzed charged (on average) $1,989 for gold OA articles and $2,905 for hybrid articles.