“If the US government and the European Union would forbid their researchers to pay APCs, this might have a similar result, certainly if other governments would follow: these authors would no longer pay APCs, and publishers would accept this because libraries will not be interested in journals that boycott so many manuscripts. Without library subscriptions and payment of APCs by American and European authors, almost all journals will financially break down unless another source of income will be found. Because progress of science is a conditio sine qua non for modern society, society (i.e., governments) will eventually be willing to make arrangements with science publishers to pay lump sums as a substitute for APCs, just like now such sums are paid for access to journals.

Obviously, the abandonment of APCs (and comparable charges) will be complicated, but there will be important advantages: predatory journals, for instance, will disappear so that the contamination of good scientific literature by low-quality contributions will (almost) completely be stopped.

Authors and their employers would profit because they need no longer worry about APCs; publishers would profit for several reasons: (1) they would have a fairly fixed income, (2) they would not have to spend time to decide (subjectively!) about waiving APCs, and (3) they would no longer have predatory journals as competitors; databases would no longer need to handle articles of almost countless amounts of commonly low-quality articles published in predatory journals; and finally (but most importantly), medical researchers would be able to consider newly published medical literature as reliable, since the tsunami of paid-for articles published solely for reasons of publish-or-perish would be stopped: a bright and promising future for the medical community and for society!”