journal or a gold open access book, there is no subscription or price to pay and no institutional login form to complete; they can simply access the material free of charge.
Clearly, this has implications for the economic models of publishers. If publishers cannot sell the work (because they are giving it away for free), they must find remuneration elsewhere. Therefore, some forms of gold open access require that the author or his/her institution pay a fee to the publisher, a move that constitutes an inversion of the current subscription model. This is known as an ‘article processing charge’ (APC) or a ‘book processing charge’ (BPC). It is true that many publishers are adopting this model for gold open access in which publishing becomes a service for which academics and/or their institutions pay. It is also true that, faced with a new and wholly disruptive proposition in which publishers are less sure of their revenue forecasts, the current pricing level of processing charges has sometimes been determined through a re-apportioning of the status quo.14 As will be seen, this has often led to levels of pricing beyond the reach of humanities researchers who receive far less funding than those working in the sciences.15
Gold open access does not intrinsically mean, however, that the author pays and, indeed, this was not integral to the term as it was coined by Stevan Harnad.16 At the time of writing in mid 2014, the majority of gold venues listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals do not operate on the basis of article processing charges and instead fund their operations through other means, covered in Chapter 2.17 To this end, in this book, whenever I refer to ‘gold open access’, I mean open access delivered at source by journals, books or other output format; open access at the publisher. I am not referring to any particular kind of business model. It is exclusively in the instances where I write ‘article processing charges’ or ‘APCs’, ‘book processing charges’ or ‘BPCs’ that I will be talking about payment to publishers.
The ‘opposite’, but also complement, to gold open access is called green OA. Green open access is OA delivered by an institutional or subject repository. An institutional repository is a website, normally administered by a university library, that holds the metadata about and copies of affiliated authors’ works. For instance, the repository at the University of Lincoln, UK can be found at http://eprints.lincoln.ac.uk/. Whenever
