Gold Open Access and Article Processing Charges: Point of Risk and the Risk Pool

"In my recent work I have begun to think of the subscription publication environment in terms of a risk pool. I wanted to use this space to share a little of this rationale because I think it gives us a valuable way of conceiving of projects like arXiv, Knowledge Unlatched, my Open Library of Humanities, and the K/N white paper. The basic version is: a subscription model is a financial risk pool that conceives of publishing as entailing the purchase of a commodity object (thereby blocking OA). APCs, by contrast, concentrate financial risk (bad) but conceive of publishing as a service to an author client (thereby facilitating OA). Consortial/cooperative funding models spread financial risk across a pool but still conceive of publishing as a service, achieving the best of both worlds. A more thorough rationale below excerpted from the current draft of an article that I’m writing. Gold open access, in which publishing is remunerated from an alternative business model to the current subscription/sales mode, suggests a reconfiguration of the current economics, with a suggested potential for savings. In this mode, the functions of publishing (which Michael Bhaskar defines as filtering, framing and amplification (Bhaskar 2013)) are not undertaken in the service of creating and selling a commodity object (a journal or book) but are instead to be viewed as a service to authors. In other words, the value-adding elements of publishing should not be paid for by readers but by clients of publishers: academics, their funders and institutions. There is no single way in which these economics can be reconfigured. Some open-access journals operate on the basis of voluntary labour of editorial staff, meaning that the costs are essentially cross-subsidised by institutional or personal time. Others, such as the Open Library of Humanities platform that I am building, solicits funding from an international library consortium so that there is no need to sell material. The most well-known (although not the most common) way of remunerating the labour of publishing as a service is through a mode called Article Processing Charges (APCs). This mode is one wherein the authors, their institution or their funders must pay a fee to the publisher so that the necessary work can be covered. When properly implemented, this is not a payment to bypass peer review and it is in no way incompatible with rigorous quality control. It does, though, cause disquiet for several reasons. I will briefly discuss one of these here ..."