Are “Institutional Memberships” a viable way to reduce APCs? : Open Access Now

"Editorial: The recent development of memberships that allow 'academic and research institutions, societies, groups, funders and corporations to actively support open access' through institutional memberships to a publisher’s OA journals should give us pause. On the surface, this appears to be a good thing. We expect publishers to adapt to a changing scholarly communication landscape, preferably in ways that promote openness. However, we must wonder how these institutional memberships will affect both faculty choices of journals, as well as library dependence on large publishers. When library and many university-wide budgets are crunched, will such memberships encourage faculty to publish in a given set of journals, while fostering library dependence on specific publishers? Additionally, having invested a substantial sum of money in a particular publisher’s OA journal, are we then incentivized to become advocates of that publisher to our faculty authors? ... Conversely, Initiatives such as COPE call on us to promote openness without subsidizing any particular publisher."