apcs

Unless you're willing to sell APCs and cruise missiles to private parties, there's no way a rebellion can outgun country's military.

Conflating OA with APCs isn't a nefarious PR campaign by the paywall publishers (disclaimer: I'm affiliated with one).

But take all the money that universities around the world spend in subscriptions, add all the money that is paid in APCs.

Try looking at photographs of city streets taken during a normal working day, and note the absence of APCs and riot police.

Now, police = without adequate training - get to play soldier with APCs, camo (!), and a variety of modern weapons that are overpowered or unsuited for police work.

> Try looking at photographs of city streets taken during a normal working day, and note the absence of APCs and riot police.

Not sure if the trend of more APCs going from grant funders to publishers is a good one, but probably better that the grant funders pay than those who can't afford access.

Of course now that we've been providing every small town sheriff with APCs and military weapons, that deterrent effect might no longer be as relevant as it once was.

Granted, I'm sure you can find examples of individual societies choosing to provide a high quality OA journal without the use of APCs, but that's the exception, not the rule.

PLoS is the prime non-profit example, Hindawi is a for-profit OA example, and there are countless others that all focus on APCs being the mechanism to sustain OA publication (some call them different things, like PeerJ's membership model).

First I would like to show the fallacy of your reasoning: we're discussing the unreasonableness of the current price of APCs for open access publications, and you are justifying its reasonableness by giving the current prices.

So the authors will still want the prestige of the top-tier journals (at least while hiring decisions are still made with that metric), and one byproduct of mandates like these is more APCs flowing to the big publishers.

But overall the meteoric rise (and financial success) of non-profit PLoS seems like the biggest contributor to "OA = APCs".