Pay It Forward: Investigating a Sustainable Model of Open Access Article Processing Charges for Large North American Research Institutions

"As the global open access movement continues to grow and evolve, the question of whether a wholesale shift of the scholarly journal publishing system to “gold” open access is a viable way forward is of increasing interest. In such a shift, all journal publishers would make all scholarly articles freely available to readers, with authors or their institutions paying to publish their work when required by the publisher, rather than readers paying to read it. Lending momentum to this discussion is the fact that gold open access journals have steadily gained market share, doubling in article volume every four years and now in excess of 14% of the total journal output1 . While gold open access doesn’t require any particular funding model, a common one is an article processing charge paid by authors, or another entity on their behalf, to cover the cost of publishing an article that has been accepted for publication. If that business model is adopted by a majority of journal publishers in the future, there are significant financial implications for the academy. As we consider the trade-offs of the status quo and various methods of achieving broad open access, questions pertaining to the long-term financial sustainability of the article processing charge business model must be carefully contemplated.... The project focused on large, research-intensive universities in North America and defined sustainability as costing those institutions roughly no more than, and ideally considerably less than, current journal subscription costs for comparable journals today, with a rate of growth that will be possible for these institutions to support over time. The project sheds new light on the financial viability of the article processing charge business model to create open access at a much larger scale...."