Timothy Gowers - Google+ - A hybrid journal is a subscription journal that offers its…

"A hybrid journal is a subscription journal that offers its authors the option of paying an article processing charge in return for the article being made freely available online. I am not at all in favour of this model, since it doesn't do anything to solve the problem of excessive journal costs. If anything it does the reverse. Societies like the LMS have open-access options, and they tell us that the take-up is extremely low. In an interesting twist, the AMS has defined a variant of the hybrid model where instead of having an open-access option, you have a companion open-access journal, which you call series B, which has an article processing charge. The companion journal shares an editorial board with the original journal, and you don't decide which you are submitting to until your article is accepted. As far as I can tell, there are two differences between this and the hybrid model. (i) When you are cited, the phrase 'series B' appears after the name of the journal. (ii) Papers published in the series B journal are electronic only. Is that enough of a difference that I should approve? I genuinely don't know. At the moment, the AMS says that it plans to keep publishing their existing journals at the same rate: if they were, say, publishing only x% of the number of issues of the traditional journals and transferring the remaining (100-x)% to the series B journals it would be a different matter (as long as library subscriptions dropped to x%). But they explicitly say that they are not doing that. However, what this move does mean is that a gradual transition to an open access model will be possible in the future, should that turn out to be the way things are going. Two things that worry me about the statement that the AMS has put out are:  (i) they do not say anything about fee waivers -- it seems from what they write that their attitude is that if you don't have funds to pay APCs then you'll get your article published in the subscription journal and you should be happy with that; (ii) they do not say how much their APCs will be."