“The Open Access beat-up has, inadvertently, been the death knell of quality academic publishing, driving a fatal wedge between the incentives of publishers and those of journal editors. There are various different models that publishers are employing to come to grips with the Open Access world, and each of those models has its own implications for what pressures publishers are incentivized to put on the editors of their journals.
Abstracting from particularities, one fact seems to dominate almost all of those approaches, directly or indirectly. That fact is just this. The profits of commercial publishers are increasingly a function of ridiculously large Open Access fees, whether paid by the author, the grant-giver or (nowadays most typically) the author’s home institution or national government through ‘Read and Publish Transformative Agreements’. The way to maximize those profits is to maximize the number of articles a journal publishes – and to do so without regard to quality. (As I have said, given bundling and consortia, no library can unsubscribe to an individual journal of diminishing quality anyway, so a journal’s quality is no longer a commercial concern to publishers seeking to maximize profits.)…”