There is a lot of talk about Article Processing Charges (APC) and Open Access, and it just has never seemed to me that that is a sustainable business model. The issue comes up yet again in the RIN Report “Paying for Open Access Publication Charges.” Surprisingly enough the word “sustainability” is not used though the conclusions in this report center around the likely increased competition for funds as Open Access grows, and funds to pay APC’s centralize in libraries.

Philip Davis from Scholarly Kitchen notes:

[M]any library administrators are pushing for these author funds, and in many cases, the monies are simply being skimmed off existing library collection funds or were provided as a one-time gift from a Vice Chancellor before the economy took a nosedive. As the RIN report states on page 23, there is clearly not enough money to support both author-pays and subscription-pays models.

APC’s work for now in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Medicine) fields, and ostensibly a pool would allow humanities and social science scholars the use of funds to pay APC’s if there were Open Access journals operating on that business model. But why move from one unsustainable model – the current print publication/learned society/university press model – to another?