Thank you for commenting Leo. I see that I did not describe the difference between the subscription and the open access models as well as I might have. As you point out, the traditional subscription model also levies the fee upfront. The difference is that the OA article-processing charge was conceived as a one-off fee intended to allow the publisher to recover all the costs of publication (plus an element of profit) before the article was published. The logic was that this would allow articles to be made freely available on the Internet rather than locked behind a paywall (and the assumption was that the costs of scholarly publishing would fall as a result).

It may be that the subscription model was originally conceived as a one-off charge too, but it is not viewed as one today. Certainly downstream subscriptions continue to be charged, not least via Backfile Collections.

You are also right to point out that hybrid OA licences (along with the various membership schemes introduced by pure OA publishers) are restoring the classical model. Indeed, we appear to be witnessing the reinvention of the “big deal”, and all the controversial pricing issues that accompany that.

I guess we should also note that publishers are discovering there are ways of earning additional downstream revenue from OA articles as well — plus ça change perhaps.

In the end, I think, the real issue is not when customers are billed, but how much they are billed. After all, if the services that publishers provided were affordable to all then the calls for open access would have been far less clamorous.

That costs are currently rising rather than falling is a significant failure of the OA movement. This is one of the issues I discuss in my introduction to the interview with Tracz here http://richardpoynder.co.uk/Tracz_Interview.pdf


On 24 September 2015 at 01:15, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> From: leo waaijers <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Wed, 23 Sep 2015 09:38:12 +0200
>
> I am a bit puzzled. See this:
>
> "Instead of charging readers a downstream subscription fee, BMC levies an
> upfront article-processing charge, or APC."
>
> Isn't it just the opposite? Subscription fees always had to be paid in the
> autumn of the year before, whereas APCs are invoiced at the moment of
> acceptance of an article i.e. after the peer review and editing has taken
> place. Via the recent hybrid OA licences publishers succeeded in restoring
> the classical mode of upfront payment.
>
> Leo Waaijers
>
>
> Op 22-9-2015 om 1:39 schreef LIBLICENSE:
> From: Richard Poynder <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Mon, 21 Sep 2015 16:03:38 +0100
>
> Vitek Tracz is a hero of the open access movement, and it is not hard
> to see why. Fifteen years ago he founded the world’s first for-profit
> OA publisher BioMed Central (BMC), and pioneered pay-to-publish gold
> OA. Instead of charging readers a downstream subscription fee, BMC
> levies an upfront article-processing charge, or APC. By doing so it is
> able to cover its costs at the time of publication, and so make the
> papers it publishes freely available on the Internet.
>
> Many said Tracz’s approach would not work. But despite initial
> scepticism BMC eventually convinced other publishers that it had a
> sustainable business model, and so encouraged them to put their toes
> in the OA waters too. As such, OA advocates believe BMC was vital to
> the success of open access. As Peter Murray-Rust put it in 2010,
> “Without Vitek and BMC we would not have open access”.
>
> Today Tracz has a new, more radical, mission, which he is pursuing with
> F1000.
>
> A Q&A with Tracz is available here:
> http://poynder.blogspot.co.uk/2015/09/the-open-access-interviews-f1000.html
>
> A commentary on the issues arising from the interview is separately
> available here: http://richardpoynder.co.uk/Tracz_Interview.pdf
>
> Richard Poynder