education, as it exhibits the characteristics of the battle for openness that were set out in Chapter 1. For example, there is considerable money involved in the industry. Reed Elsevier reported revenue of over £6 billion in 2012, of which over £2 billion was for Science, Technical and Medical publishing. It's an area where openness has 'won', to a large extent, with mandates from research funders, government and institutions which make open access publishing compulsory. And yet at the time of victory, open access advocates are also beset with doubt and conflict.
The Gold route is to make journals open access, so any reader can access the content free of charge. The focus of the Gold route is on using journals as the means to share content. There are different ways that such journals can be funded; for example, a university or professional society might fund the journal itself. If it is a journal published by an existing publisher, then the usual route is that of Article Process Charges (APCs), where the author (or the research funder) pays a charge for making the article open. The Gold route is favoured by many mandates, but with APCs, it may well end up costing more both financially and in terms of opportunity, as will be explored below.
An open access 'sting' operation published in Science (Bohannon 2013), where an obviously flawed, fake article was accepted by 157 OA journals, demonstrated that this pay-to-publish model may create a tension in the relationship with the publisher. This sting was revealing with regards to the battle for open for two reasons. Firstly, it demonstrated again that 'openness' has market value as a term, and so dubious journals have entered the marketplace offering open access publishing. Secondly, the incumbents (many of whom published the article) may not have a vested interest in making OA a success. If OA is perceived as lower quality, then it reinforces their market
