The California Geographer and the OA movement: using the green OA institutional repository as a publishing platform

Publishing in open access has been largely dominated by Gold OA journals. Publication in these journals, which in some cases have developed as the leading scholarly journals in their respective disciplines, provides immediate dissemination of information, a greater likelihood of citations for authors, and costs less than traditional publishing venues (Wagner, 2010). Lesk (2012) estimates that publisher Elsevier spends about $10,000 per article published, while the Public Library of Science (PLoS), a prominent Gold OA journal, spends only about $1,500 per article. PLoS's fee-based approach is a vital part of the open access movement even as it erects economic obstacles for researchers who lack sufficient funding to pay publishing fees. Total costs are clearly cheaper than their traditional counterparts, but those costs are essentially shifted from readers onto authors.