This morning I published a paper at the Open Journal of Astrophysics that brought the total number of publications there to 217. That may not seem a very significant number but I’ve had it in the back of my mind for some time. Some time ago Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS) decided to go Gold Open Access, charging a baseline APC of £2310 per article. That cost is not paid directly by authors from institutions with Read and Publish agreements with Oxford University Press (the publisher ofn MNRAS) but that doesn’t mean that it’s free.
Anyway, taking the indicative cost of an APC to be the £2310 charged by MNRAS – some journals charge a lot more – the fact that we have published 217 papers means we have now saved the astronomical community around 217 × £2310 which is over £500k (€600k) in APCs. The cost to us is just a few percent of that figure.
The issue of University funding is a very live one in England, in Ireland and in the The Netherlands. None of the financial crises can be solved completely by moving away from APCs but there is no justification at all for continuing to hand millions per year out of a shrinking pot over to greedy publishers. Surely this is an excellent time for Higher Education Institutions collectively to make a decisive move in the direction of Diamond Open Access?
