One problem this does is it shifts the costs of this to individual projects.
In my field, the average OA field is probably around $3000.
Assuming a five year project that produces 5 papers a year (not unreasonable), you get $75,000.
That's almost exactly what it costs, with salary, tuition, and fringe, to support two graduate students. So funders would have to accept getting less productivity from the same projects.
It also favors large labs with senior PIs that have the funding to absorb those costs.
Exactly, this is a major issue that non-academics always miss when talking about OA. The replacement to charging readers seems to have become a shift of costs to researchers, with an expectation they'll have lots of grants that are willing to pay huge publishing fees.
The only effective way I see to get around this is for granting agencies to start putting massive caps on what they are willing to pay for journal articles. If they mandate $200 max per article, no one is going to be able to afford a $5000 article anymore. Journals would be forced to adapt.
Your lab only has to pay grad students $7,500 a year? Seems like that might be the number that’s out of whack in the equation. To be fair, I live in the Bay Area, where $7,500 only gets you like 3-4 months rent.
In my field, the average OA field is probably around $3000.
Assuming a five year project that produces 5 papers a year (not unreasonable), you get $75,000.
That's almost exactly what it costs, with salary, tuition, and fringe, to support two graduate students. So funders would have to accept getting less productivity from the same projects.
It also favors large labs with senior PIs that have the funding to absorb those costs.