PASTEUR4OA/Revealing the true costs of Gold OA- Towards a public data infrastructure of scholarly publishing costs

As the public purse continues to invest in Gold OA, it is important to map the costs of current publication models. Yet, the Gold OA market is largely opaque. Data on both the costs of subscriptions and of APCs are hard to gather. If they can be obtained, they only offer partial but very different insights into the market. This is a problem for efficient open access publishing. Funders, institutions, and individual researchers are increasingly concerned that a transition to Gold OA could leave research community open for exploitative financial practices and prevent effective market coordination.

Which factors contribute to the current opacity in the market? Which approaches are taken to foster financial transparency of Gold OA? And what are recommendations to funders, institutions, researchers and publishers to increase transparency? This briefing paper presents the current state of financial opacity in scholarly journal publishing. It describes what information is needed in order to obtain a bigger, more systemic picture of financial flows, and to understand how much money is going into the system, where this money comes from, and how these financial flows might be adjusted to support different kinds of publishing models.