PASTEUR4OA: : Revealing the true costs of Gold OA - towards a public data infrastructure of scholarly publishing costs

Abstract

This briefing paper presents the current state of financial opacity in scholarly journal publishing. It describes what information is needed in order to obtain a bigger, more systemic picture of financial flows, and to understand how much money is going into the system, where this money comes from, and how these financial flows might be adjusted to support different kinds of publishing models. This document aims to shed light on following questions: What do we currently know about the costs of open access publishing? Which factors contribute to the current opacity in the market? Which approaches are taken to foster financial transparency of Gold OA? And what are recommendations to funders, institutions, researchers and publishers to increase transparency?