Question: I'm not in the academic world, but I assume the idea of the APC is that the individual author won't be paying it, and it's not expensive enough that the institutions they're affiliated with will balk at the cost, right? So, in that respect it's sort of like that pricing sweet spot that results in $50/user/mo software licenses, $3000 2-day conference tickets, etc.

Not to say that $1700 (roughly the number they list in their FAQ) is an unreasonable amount given the work that goes into reviewing, editing, and publishing an article. Indeed, I wonder if they couldn't raise the cost a bit.

It really varies. Normally the author themselves has to come up with the money somehow though. At least where I've been, you can't just bill it to the university. If you have research grants, you can often pay out of those (this is common in the natural sciences). If you have some kind of general research budget you could pay out of that (e.g. I get $2k/yr unrestricted research money from my university... but I'm definitely not going to spend it on an APC!). Some universities do have an internal OA fund you can apply to, but those are often limited. For example, MIT will cover up to $1k per article for papers written by its faculty/staff/students: https://libraries.mit.edu/scholarly/publishing/oa-publishing...

Typically you would pay for it out of grant money. So Dr. Smith doesn’t pay the APC, Stanvard University doesn’t pay, the NSF pays. Or to cut a long story short, the taxpayer.

If the taxpayer is paying for the grant, I have zero problems with them paying for publishing of the research.

The funny thing is taxpayers ripped twice, on publishing and on access to the science and the profit goes to publication industry (not universities, research institution).

If you summarize the cash flow, the publishing industry charges twice the taxpayers in addition to the science worker and research institutions costs. If you want to make your article open access, then you pay extra fees and nowadays, the university funds ripped off twice: they still bear the cost of pay-wall publishers and open access. Long story short, the whole system is rigged in favor of gatekeepers. You may check this video[1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PriwCi6SzLo

And what level of surplus are you happy to have added to your tax bills?

The taxpayer currently pays for it, too, through journal transcriptions paid for by university libraries.

Net effect could swing either way.

> The work that goes into reviewing, editing, and publishing an article.

The work reviewing and editing is unpaid. The entire cost goes toward publishing.