Difficulties of Open Access Publishing

Some concerning thoughts on the open access publishing method GOLDEN ACCESS by John Charmley, director of employability and professor of History at the University of East Anglia, UK:

By April 2013 all UK academic journals have been told they must sign up to the Gold Standard of Open Access – that is they will have to make their content freely available on-line; so the next time David Willetts writes a book, he can access the articles for free. The problem is there is no such thing as ‘free’. Academic journals have content-management systems and other costs which need paying for. Finch knows that and is suggesting that academics should pay up front for these services when submitting their articles. Here’s the first difficulty. Quite apart from the contested question of ‘how much?’ there are five related ones. How are Universities going to cover this cost? What about those not in tenured University posts?  What about those outside the UK? What about the problem of “vanity publishing”– the fact that paying to publish an article undermines the entire notion that publication is a filter for quality? And most important: why does the Finch report recommend that universities continue to pay taxpayers’ money to for-profit academic publishers, at the expense of already-strapped university budgets?