Page:Open access and the humanities - contexts, controversies and the future.pdf/90

 However, the costs included are equal neither between disciplines nor even between individual articles/books.62 For instance, while some costs remain the same regardless of the type of material under consideration (digital preservation, for example, unless considering big data [where custom applications must be written to ensure continued access to extremely large datasets]), other expenditures such as fact checking, peer review and typesetting vary enormously according to the type of publication. As an example, the fact checking and peer-review portions of an article proclaiming the safety or otherwise of a vaccine need to be conducted with greater rigour (and at greater labour time) than that of an article about the nineteenth-century novel. Likewise, if a piece of work features mathematical notation, complex chemical formulae, tables, associated data or any of a raft of other necessary formatting idiosyncrasies, the cost of labour and/or technology is necessarily higher. In other words, undifferentiated pricing of gold open access article processing charges leads to a system of cross-subsidy in which works that are easier to publish and that require less labour time effectively subsidise their counterparts. Why should a 1,500 word, plain-text book review cost the same in an APC model as an 8,000 word article with complex symbols and typesetting requirements?

Such a system of cross-subsidy may be desirable to ensure the continuation of those disciplines with more complex publishing requirements. However, gold open access charges set at a universal, undifferentiated rate have the potential to damage the credibility of a service-based, supply-side payment model of academic publishing. This is because undifferentiated pricing gives the impression of a black box into which money is thrown and out of which comes a product and sometimes proﬁts, with insufﬁcient justiﬁcation to ‘clients’ for the resources. That said, there are also several clear factors that hinder the development of transparent, ‘unbundled’ pricing. The ﬁrst factor is the difﬁculty of articulating and pricing the value-adding aspects of academic publishing. This should be easier than it appears given that this labour consists of, at least in the current age of the book: selective acquisition, ﬁnancial investment/ risk, content development, quality control, management/coordination and sales/marketing.63 The second factor, however, is that it is often unclear which services can safely be ‘unbundled’ without