Article processing charges: A new route to open access?

Article Processing Charges (APCs) have recently been studied as a means towards a sustainable Open Access (OA) environment for scholarly communications. However, APCs at any level represent a substantial economic barrier to the authors, institutions, funding agencies and governments that many of its advocates most wish to serve through OA initiatives. This paper claims that no business model based on APCs as a tool to facilitate the large-scale transition to OA can navigate the ethical dilemmas identified by political philosophers as appropriate for the kind of global environment in which scholarly publishing operates.