An Evidence-based Assessment of the "Author Pays" Model

Much discussion of author payments as a means to Open Access lacks consideration of evidence on their potential impact on the scholarly journal system. Our recent work perhaps sheds new light on both favourable and unfavourable aspects of this option.

We emphasize the diversity of communication communities among authors, and between the authors and the extensive non-author reading community. We also take a broad system perspective, given that the author payment model will potentially impact not only authors but also, for example, R&D funders, university and other organization staff and library budgets, publishers, and readers. This raises several issues. Who should fund author payment? Can subscription and author payment models co-exist? How should new author payment journals be financed?