Gold Open Access starts at the AMS | episodic thoughts

"The AMS has announced that their two Gold Open Access journals have started accepting papers on september 1, 2013: the Proc.AMS(series B) and Trans.AMS(series B) journals. So, since they already had Green Open Access for all their previous journals, I’m really curious to see how it pans out. The APC for a paper in Proc.AMS(B) are $750 per paper in 2014, and $1500 after that. For Trans.AMS(B) it is $1,400 at discount rate, and then $2,750 from 2015 onwards ... So basically, on purely economic terms, Green beats Gold straightforwardly.  But maybe a PhD student or postdoc who prefers to have on a CV a final publication reference rather than something ‘to appear in’ may want to go for Gold. That’s about the only reason I can think of. What remains to be seen is whether or not this would start a vicious cycle of some sort (not sure what, if any).  Edit: come to think of it, the vicious cycle might be 'so you see, people want to publish this way, so we’ve decided to phase out paper journals and green OA entirely.'"