among institutions to allow everyone to have access, an aspect that could just be reversed to the supply side through article or book processing charges for gold open access if care is not taken. However, the work is published and publishers are afloat, sometimes making healthy profits. This makes it possible to deduce some crucial information. Assuming that it is desirable to keep the volume of material published at the same level (i.e. the degree of pre-filtering/rejection would remain unchanged), any problems of unaffordability of gold open access must be attributed to one or more of three points. Firstly, this unaffordability could be the fault of a transition period to supply-side payments for gold open access in which there are the double costs of subscriptions and of open access (so-called ‘double dipping’). Secondly, the difficulties of cost could be attributed to models for gold open access that rely on localised funding for authors (article/book processing charges), thereby replicating the existing problems of unequal access on the supply side and giving the impression of systemic budgetary crisis to authors who cannot publish. Thirdly and finally, publishers could fundamentally be charging more for gold open access.
The first of these issues – regarding transition costs and double dipping – is already being addressed. Publishers do not wish to seen to be charging twice for their work (i.e. charging both subscribers/ purchasers for a subscription/book and authors/institutions for an article/book processing charge). To this end, many publishers have implemented arrangements whereby the amounts paid in processing charges are deducted from the costs paid by subscribers or purchasers. Taking an example of a journal, the problem here, of course, is that by reducing the amount paid across the whole range of subscribers, the cost to the individual institution that spent the APC is only marginally offset. This means that early adopters of APC-based gold open access pay more to support the transition. Taylor & Francis, for example, explain this thus for their journal model: ‘We acknowledge that the worldwide benefit of an increase in open access content in subscription journals may initially be paid for by a small number of institutions at the forefront of funding open access. We are unable to offer these institutions direct substitution of OA charges for subscription fees, since our commitment to no “double dipping” means the reductions in cost need to be shared
