Chris Hartgerink, writing about the new, modular publishing platform ResearchEquals.com, which launched today:
We need to work to keep open access accessible to the Global Majority. We join the efforts for new business models to that end. Recent innovations such as Subscribe to Open, Direct to Open, and Read & Let Read are necessary parts of that evolution. Pay to close is our contribution. We're creating and testing out how viable this new financing model is for Open Access.
Hartgerink is founder and director of liberate science, the entity behind ResearchEquals. The organization appears to be a nonprofit consulting firm—though there's no easy-to-find statement about the group's legal status.
Looking forward to kicking the new platform's tires, especially since the pay-to-close idea (akin to Github's private repositories) is intriguing. The idea is that you pay a fee to publish anything but CC BY—a charge that escalates as your license gets more restrictive, all the way to €550 for a closed license. My first gripe (it's more than a quibble) is that a CC BY-NC is €200, reflecting a broader CC BY fetishism in the open science world. CC BY-NC, for principled and practical reasons both, should be a first-class citizen. In the ResearchEquals case, that should mean free to publish.