Generate text that refutes this claim: Who will write and edit the work?  You can’t take the end result out of the system and assume all the rest of it will continue as usual. Journal articles don’t write themselves; there will still be costs for editors, typesetters, reviewing etc., as well as the time and cost of the writer. The average cost of publishing an article is about £4000. [1]  There have been two suggested forms of open access ‘Gold’ in which authors pay publishers article publication charges and ‘Green’ under which the author self-archives their papers in open access repositories. The gold option that the UK intends to implement could mean universities having to find an extra £60million a year. [2] In either case the cost is being put on the author.  This is exactly the same when asking academics to put their lectures, lecture notes, bibliographies etc online. They are being asked to put in more hours grappling with technology without being paid for it.  [1] Moghaddam, Golnessa Galyani, “Why Are Scholarly Journals Costly even with Electronic Publishing?”  p.9  [2] Ayris, Paul, “Why panning for gold may be detrimental to open access research”, Guardian Professional, 23 July 2012.
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This is trying to pull the wool over the eyes of those who fund the research in the first place; the taxpayer. The taxpayer (or in some cases private funder) pays for the research to be done and so is paying for the paper to be written. It then does not make sense that the taxpayer should pay again in order to access the research that they paid to have done in the first place. Yes there are small costs associated with checking and editing the articles but these could easily be added into research budgets especially as it would mean cutting out an extra cost that occurs due to the profit margins of the academic publishers. As Neelie Kroes, European Commission Vice-President for the Digital Agenda, says “Taxpayers should not have to pay twice for scientific research”. [1]  [1] Kroes, Neelie, “Scientific data: open access to research results will boost Europe's innovation capacity”, Europa.eu, 17 July 2012.