Over the past years, the Open Access (OA) publishing models have been shaping the way we publish, allowing scientific articles to be freely available online without any funding or legal barriers. At a first glance, the OA publishing model apparently universalizes science, making it accessible to everyone, in agreement with the human right to science, as recognized by Article 27 of Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR, 1948). The economic model that seems to have gained prominence, particularly for flipping subscription-based journals to OA and/or adopted by many prominent new titles, is one where the financial burden is shifted to the authors. Most often, this is bundled into one article processing charge (APC); though some hybrid journal titles have a non-OA APCs, and an additional OA charge, in case the author(s) are interested in publishing into so-called Gold OA. So let us call this Author-Pays OA, keeping in mind that the author charges are most often, though not always, termed APCs.
