With our publishing platform ResearchEquals.com we are introducing a new business model for open access: Pay to close.
We love open access - it is a massive part of why we even started building ResearchEquals. We also hear the scholarly community's issues with the business models of open access.
As the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science summarizes:
high article processing charges [...] may be causes of inequality for the scientific communities around the world and, in some cases, the loss of intellectual property and knowledge
This inequity needs addressing. Especially when transformative agreements are becoming the new Big Deals and Article Processing Charges (APCs) are rising faster than inflation.
We need to work to keep open access accessible to the Global Majority. We join the efforts for new business models to that end. Recent innovations such as Subscribe to Open, Direct to Open, and Read & Let Read are necessary parts of that evolution.
Pay to close is our contribution. We're creating and testing out how viable this new financing model is for Open Access.
The premise is this: If you publish under a strict open access license, you don't pay anything.
If you want to publish under a more restrictive copyright license, you have to pay. Moreover, you pay exponentially more the more restrictive you want to license the content, despite the content being freely available to everyone.
Under "pay to close" publications with more restrictive licenses will still be free to access. The only difference is the license attached.
You can't pay to paywall - you can only pay to close the license.
