I find your message here a little confusing, as you seem to be railing against a number of different parties. The simple fact is that the RCUK, and increasingly other funding bodies, are channelling funds specifically to pay for the APCs under Gold Open Access via the institution, and most Universities in the UK who have this funding are channelling it via the library, not the individual authors. Each library is currently developing their own processes and systems to support the efficient management of these APC payments, as there is significant cost involved in managing any process developed on an individual organisation scale.

The benefit of a shared service and the economies of scale which intermediaries can offer are significant, and in the real world we all have to live by the value we deliver. If we don’t deliver value, then we don’t have a role to play in this.

You seem to have missed the fact that there is now, in the UK, funding in place to encourage the processing of many thousands of APCs, and this is hugely inefficient if done at an individual institution level, let alone at individual author level as you seem to suggest is the case.

As Gold is the current model of choice for RCUK there is a real need to help streamline processes, to save money and to improve service. If companies like Swets can support this then that is not parasitic, it’s what drives best practice and scales efficiency. Our service has been developed independently of any philosophical arguments for or against gold/green open access publishing, and after much dialogue with UK university libraries.

No confusion:

A. Yes, I am "railing" against (i) Finch/RCUK, for its foolish policy of wasting scarce research money on Gold OA instead of effectively mandating cost-free Green OA, (ii) against institutions who unthinkingly treat Gold OA fees as if they were a library matter (!), and (iii) against third party businesses, eager to cash in on Finch/RCUK's folly and institutional confusion.

B. The RCUK Gold policy is an ill-thought-out, incoherent, counterproductive policy, for reasons that have by now been described many times by many authors.

C. Consigning the process of (double) paying publishers for Gold OA -- over and above already paying for subscriptions -- to a 3rd party "service" would simply be a way of sweeping the defects of the Finch/RCUK policy under the rug.

To repeat: It's authors who publish, and authors who pay to publish (if they wish, or must). Author payment is not a subscription matter, not a library matter, and not a library aggregator matter.

Stevan Harnad

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