your view strikes me as extremely myopic and you should definitively know better. 2009/10 is an exceptional year, and no one knows wether prices won’t go up again next year. Also, we still do not know how the big publishers like Springer, Wiley-Blackwell, Elsevier will behave. OA publishing is in a very early and fluid stage so it is no wonder that pricing has not yet stabilized. Also, ventures like SCOAP3 have the potential to introduce competition into the OA market.

Personally, however, I’m not so sure the degree of insulation is the same under OA as it is under the traditional model. Every time an author applies for their OA costs to be reimbursed from a fund, they will be reminded exactly what the publisher is charging. Therefore, if the article processing fee is going up excessively year on year, they will see this. Under the subscription-based model, however, your average author has absolutely no idea how much the subscription price of a journal has gone up by. The degree of insulation is therefore much greater.

I think, where possible, OA charges need to be met by funding bodies, and crucially that this should be done as part of the grant award, rather than a retrospective claim. In this way, if an academic receives, as part of their grant, say £6,000 to cover OA publishing fees, then straight away they have a budget to adhere to and will subsequently “shop around” among the journals in their field. This would introduce competition into the system and serve to keep a lid on inflation.

I’m not averse to institutional OA funds, but I think authors should only be able to apply for money from such a fund if: a) their funding body has refused to put up money for OA fees; b) if they believe their funding body has not allocated enough money for their OA fees; or c) if the research is unfunded in the first place.

Wherever the money is coming from, I think the most important thing is that the OA publishing costs are thought about at the beginning of the research project, rather than reimbursed after the event. This would certainly reduce the chances of academics being insulated from the costs of OA, even though I believe the degee of insulation is less than under the subscription-based model, as mentioned above.

The real concern is that the finite budget a university would have available to fund author charges would require an additional level of peer-review by the institution to decide whether an article from a faculty member merited publication if it were to be accepted – the likelihood of which having increased as commercial OA (vanity) publishers lower the bar to acceptance to cash in on academics’ need to publish for career advancement.

This would put those charged with making such decisions in the unenviable position of having to weigh up the merits of the output of different faculties – whose publication costs would incidentally differ by orders of magnitude in the fraction of the cost of the research they represented (from negligible, for biomedical sciences, to significant, for the humanities).

Note also that Jan Velterop, a widely respected OA advocate, has written previously about journal price increases and why this is not an effective argument for OA.

The author-pays model isn’t the only way to fund OA. The best model may well be to eliminate the publishing companies altogether, and have universities completely take over the publication of journals.

On the other hand, author processing charge have only gone up — wildly up — in the last few years.

http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6651248.html

“Publishers have been asked to roll back prices so libraries can keep valued content. Based on past records, some will remain intractable, absorb cancellations without making price concessions or renegotiating licenses, and wait for a better day. Others will deal in the hopes of keeping content in front of users until library budgets recover and prices return to prerecession levels. In recent years, price increases for journals have averaged 7–9%. Despite pleas for pricing mercies, we don’t have any information at this point that suggests those averages won’t hold for 2010. The conservative budget manager will plan on increases in that range in the coming year.”

On the other hand, open-access processing charges have done exactly the opposite.

If you look at the increase in author fees charged by BioMed Central and PloS, you will see skyrocketing price increases.

As I argued in my blog piece, a model where librarians simply pay OA author processing charges is completely unable to have moderating effects on market prices. Couple this with the fact that most OA publishers are profit-maximizing commercial entities and you have the recipe for a true crisis in scholarly publishing.

But clearly that’s the opposite of what’s happening. As is well known, journal subscription prices are skyrocketing. And as prices rise, libraries are forced to cancel subscriptions; publishers respond by raising prices for the remaining subscribers in order to keep revenue constant.

Hidden in your phrase “which titles provide good value for their institution” is a confusion over two different and utterly incommensurable types of value: scholarly and economic. The reality is that my university library, for example, cannot afford to subscribe to many journals that would have a very high academic value for my university.