Over at Biocurious, PhilipJ is considering the costs of publishing in terms of what his university spends on journal subscriptions. The University of Toronto spends around $10 million annually on periodicals, he writes, and is listed on nearly 6,500 publications per year. Running the numbers using general author fees for open access journals, PhilipJ finds that the university would've spent less money to pay for each of those publications in open access journals than it did paying for subscriptions to closed-access journals.
"I think the take-home message is reasonably clear, at least using the University of Toronto numbers: we could already afford going entirely open access," he writes. "I certainly wouldn’t feel bad if Elsevier and their ilk went out of business given the exorbitant increase in subscription costs and the non-obvious reasoning why, and I’m sure the societies could come to embrace the open access movement, which would bring the majority of high quality journals into the fold."