Symptoms of Premature Gold OA -- and their Cure

Most new Gold OA journals are not of high quality and hence they premature at this time. What is needed is more access to existing journals, not more journals. The remedy is Green OA self-archiving mandates from authors' institutions and funders. If universal Green OA eventually makes subscriptions unsustainable, the established journals can convert to the Gold OA. What will prevent pay-to-publish from causing quality standards to plummet under these conditions is that it will not be pay-to-publish but no-fault pay-to-be-peer-reviewed, regardless of whether the outcome is accept, revise, or reject. Authors will pay for each round of refereeing. And journals will (as now) form a (known) quality hierarchy, based on their track-record for peer-review standards and hence selectivity.