How much could open access publishers charge? « O'Connor Memory Judgements Lab

"I’m going to disregard the usual speculation about what type-setter and editorial assistant salaries are, and how much distribution infrastructure costs because these are all tied in to the true costs of publishing from a publisher’s perspective and not what I’m interested in. Instead, I’m going to use figures from my employer, the University of St Andrews, to crudely examine what this very small market can bear open access articles to cost. The first assumption I make here is that journal subscriptions and gold open access journal publication costs should be drawn from the same pool of money. That is, they are university outgoings that support publishers, thereby funding the publication of university-based researchers’ work. The second assumption, which almost immediately serves to highlight how useless this back-of-the-envelope calculation is, is that we no longer need to subscribe to paywalled journals and can therefore channel all funds that we would have spent on this into open access publishing. For argument’s sake, let’s suppose that the UK government has negotiated a nationwide subscription to all journals with all closed-access publishers for the 2014/2015 academic year. This leaves the University of St Andrews Library with journal subscription money that it needs to spend in order to continue its current funding allocation. Naturally, it ploughs all of this into open access publishing costs. Once comfortable with these assumptions, we can fairly easily estimate how much a university like mine could afford to pay for each article published, if every single output was a gold open access article such ..."