Gold Open Access is a term for a situation where the publication of full-text is provided by the publisher of the journal – in exchange for so-called Article Processing Charges (APC) – a fee for publishing the article. In this case, the publication costs are not paid by the readers, but by the author, research institution or consortium. A specific subset of this publishing model are so-called hybrid journals, which are available only to subscribers, but upon payment of the APC fee, the article is published in Open Access mode. For authors from the Czech Academy of Sciences (and other institutions that are part of the consortium), payment of the APC fee is provided by the CzechELIB consortium for some publishers of hybrid journals. These fees are contractually regulated through so-called transformation agreements between CzechELIB and the publishers. Participating institutions are then allocated tokens, or vouchers/vouchers, by the consortium for publishing OA articles in the journals of the participating publishers.
Related to APC fees and their unintended consequences in the current system of science assessment is the issue of predatory journals. The campaigns vimkdepublikuji.cz, Think.Check.Submit, Stop predatory practice.
