---
layout: post
status: publish
published: true
title: Financing for fee-driven gold open access
alias: "/2015/02/06/financing-for-fee-driven-gold-open-access"
date: 2015-02-06
categories:
- Open Access
- Academia
tags:
- Open Access
comments: []
---

The most well-known, although neither the most common nor the only, way of providing gold open access to research material is through article or book processing charges (APCs/BPCs). These are problematic in some disciplines where most research work is unfunded (hint: the social sciences and the humanities). It also tends to <a href="https://www.martineve.com/2014/12/10/gold-open-access-and-article-processing-charges/">concentrate costs/risk</a>. To clarify: it is not, in these instances, about paying to bypass quality control. It is paying for the labour of publishing as a service to the author so that research material can be made openly available to read and re-use.

<a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.1056280">Stuart Lawson contends</a> that the UK's Finch Report, acting on incorrect and outdated information, has now created a self-fulfilling prophecy whereby a narrow range of £1,600-£2,000 has become the norm for APCs. For books, <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781316161012.006">there is a greater range but a much higher cost</a>. The current rates requested by established presses under such a system are high and pose real, possibly insurmountable, challenges for unfunded research: <s>$2450/chapter from de Gruyter</s>; €640/chapter from InTech; £5,900 from Manchester University Press for books of up to 80,000 words; £11,000 from Palgrave; and approximately €15,000 from Springer, to name but a few. <b>[UPDATE: de Gruyter contacted me on social media to say that they charge a flat BPC now of €10,000 per book. The original source from which I derived this information was a <a href="http://www.palgrave.com/page/about-us-palgrave-open-faqs/">Palgrave comparative FAQ</a>.]</b>

Given how keen some publishers (and the UK government, who loves OA for its market perspectives) are on market phenomena, I have a question: why has nobody considered financing schemes to spread APC/BPC costs over a longer period of time? After all, in other market environments, if I want to buy something expensive, I have repayment schemes over a longer term thrust at me. I'm not told: "oh, I'm sorry, it's not viable for us to sell you a sofa, the model doesn't work". Instead, I am given the option (albeit with profitable interest for the company) to repay this over an often-lengthy period. What about spreading a book payment charge, or an article processing charge, over a 5-10 year period (matching inflation, perhaps)? Maybe, at the end of each year, if publishers wanted, they could <a href="https://www.martineve.com/2015/01/31/on-open-access-books-and-double-dipping/">offset future payments against sales revenue from selling print copies</a>.

What might it look like for a book over a 10-year repayment? That's a long time, you might say. But we're constantly being told that <a href="http://www.britac.ac.uk/news/news.cfm/newsid/1080">humanities journals</a> and books have a longer half-life, with greater usage over a longer period, so why not pay for it over a longer term?:

<table>
<tr>
<th>Publisher</th>
<th>BPC</th>
<th>Cost per book per year</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Palgrave</td>
<td>£11,000</td>
<td>£1,100</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>MUP</td>
<td>£5,900</td>
<td>£590</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Springer</td>
<td>€15,000</td>
<td>€1,500 (~£1,114)</td>
</tr>
</table>

Why hasn't a publisher thought to try this? Who will be the first? This might actually make a transition viable...