Will APC-OA lead to an exponential cost explosion?
We all know the increase in subscription costs for libraries (i.e., the serials crisis): (Image) A similar graph was recently published for APCs: Image source: http://doi.org/10.18352/lq.10280
Both figures seem to indicate a linear increase in costs over time. However, the subscription costs cover total cost, i.e., the increase in number of publication is covered in this cost. In other words, if you divide the yearly subscription fees by the number of articles published, you arrive at a number of about US$4-5k per article.
Remarkably, and this is crucially important here, this US$4-5k number has remained fairly constant since the 1990s!
The per-article APCs however, are not constant, they increase. The number of articles we published also increases, by about 3% every year. This means that in an APC-OA world, total spending on publishing is set to increase exponentially, as both the number of articles increases and the price per article.
In other words, if we could plot curves for expected total costs in a subscription world vs. expected costs in an APC-OA world, it would be plain obvious for anyone to see that the APC-OA costs explode, while subscription costs increase more slowly. If done well, I think such a curve could be the death-knell for the APC-OA idea. Who could help me plot that curve?