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 across all subscribers.’56 Conversely, another way in which some open-access humanities publishers, such as OpenEdition, have avoided double dipping, while also taking a payment, is through selling add-on beneﬁts to libraries who pay, even when an article is gold open access. This model is called ‘freemium’ and beneﬁts can include better metadata and usage statistics. These two different systems for offsetting double dipping and costs do not necessarily result in equality. The results, however, are not necessarily unequitable if these institutions can afford to pay. It is instead a progressive transition mechanism in which those with the capital to do so carry forward those who do not, at least in theory.

Whether or not this leads to a fair outcome, however, is debatable. At the currently proposed levels of article/book processing charges for gold open access, even if some institutions were to switch to a wholly supply-side payment system, it is possible that they could still not afford to publish all the material produced and deemed worthy by their faculty. Current subscription budgets in some humanities departments in the UK, for example, would stretch to a mere three articles (and not even half a book) under currently proposed prices for gold open access.57 This has led the green open access advocate Stevan Harnad to brand a switch to gold open access under such conditions as ‘fools’ gold’.58 The reasons for this are clear. Firstly, publishers have to cover the cost of work that they perform upon rejected manuscripts (review coordination etc.) even though they receive no income from such works. Secondly, APCs and BPCs are sometimes being determined by publishers dividing their current list revenue by the number of desirable publications in the future.59 While this tallies with remarks by David Sweeney of the Higher Education Funding Council for England that he does not think of open access as a costcutting exercise, there is a lack of disciplinary speciﬁcity in such remarks that causes some problems.60 Foremost among these is that the library budgets for scientiﬁc disciplines are often magnitudes of order higher than their humanities counterparts, particularly in the case of journals at the top of the prestige scale.61 Under article/book processing charge setups where pricing is either undifferentiated between disciplines or determined purely by emerging market levels set by such premises, the differences in ﬁnancial circumstances between the humanities and the sciences are not adequately reﬂected.