Author Pay Model, and What It Really Means
Open access publications are free for all to read and reuse generally under the creative commons license. In the author pay model in publishing, journals charge authors submitting their research papers fees post acceptance—article processing charges (APCs)—to help cover the publication costs. Authors pay the APCs either on their own or through their institution, organization, or funder. This misleads people into believing that authors have to pay hefty fees on their own to publish with open access. But that is not the case.
There are two main concepts that people do not realize. First, it is not the only model to publish in open access journals, and it is certainly not the most common. Many OA journals receive internal or external subsidies from universities and societies. Such journals do not charge APCs. The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) provides a list of OA journals that charge APCs and has reported that only one-third does.
Second, authors are not required to pay the fees up front and out of their pockets. Of the OA journals that charge APCs, the publishers waive the same or provide discounts based on the country of origin, whether their institution or funder has an affiliation with the publisher, and the financial status of the author. In some cases, editors choose to publish quality papers for free. Even if these do not apply, the APCs are paid by the institution or organization the authors work under or by the funder of their project. Only in rare cases, when authors are unable to access the necessary funds to publish their papers, do they pay out of their own pockets. These apply to Golden OA. If it is Green OA, authors do not have to pay any fees at all.
The APCs of OA journals are often lesser than or equal to the page or color charges that subscription journals charge authors. The charge levied by any OA journal is always lesser than the actual cost of publishing the author’s work.
The correct term that indicates that the author’s funding body is responsible for arranging the fees, if necessary, is “author-side fees.” When the term “author pay” is used, authors who are not aware of the actual implication of the term tend to refrain from OA journals because they think they cannot afford to pay the fees.
Awareness about the various models of open access publishing is essential to make an informed decision about which journal is best suited for one’s research. OA journals are more beneficial to the scholarly community than traditional journals, which is why there is a continuous shift to open access publishing.
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Sources
2. https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Author_Pay_Model_in_Open_Access_Publishing.