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Building on the policies that promote Open Access in Health and aiming to speed up access to information, BioMed Central (BMC) is a new player making its way onto the digital scientific publishing scene. In the early 2000s, it developed an offer of digital journals ex nihilo that published articles in Open Access. To do so, it relies on the Gold model (characterized by publications with free, open and immediate access for the author and the reader) and is included in the Berlin Declaration for Open Access. However, BMC “adapted” the original Gold model by asking the author (or their institution) to pay to publish, in order to find the resources to develop its platform and model. BMC thus introduced the article processing charge (APC), a publication fee that allows the publisher to finance the publication, which is in fact distributed under a Creative Commons License. This is an ingenious reversal of the subscription business model: payment is no longer made by the reader (or their library) but by the author (their institution or research project). The Gold Author-Pays model is born [TEN 16]. This transformation led to more precise terminology: the original Gold model was renamed the Gold Diamond model, to emphasize the difference. The need for immediate access to validated scientific information in the field of health has thus given rise to a business model that is now at the center of structural changes in scientific communication in Health.

In 2006, PloS (Public Library of Science), another Gold publisher, launched a range of journals under the Gold Author-Pays model using the same arguments [BAR 06],

The potential benefits of such a change are vast. No longer will physicians have to base their practice on half-truths. Instead, everyone from patients to policy-makers can read for themselves the evidence on which crucial science and health policy decisions are made.

The success of Gold Author-Pays publishing was still in its early stages: BMC, which became the spearhead of the young anthill of Gold publishers in the field of Health, was acquired by Springer in 2008⁷. It thus proved its success and, at the same time, transferred its expertise to the number 2 in scientific publishing. The SpringerNature group, which is today one of the major players in Open Access publishing,⁸ capitalized on BMC’s experience to develop its Gold journal offer and the Read & Publish⁹ agreements to libraries and their institutions, as part of the “transformative agreements”. It is intended to replace subscriptions to digital journal packages [OLS 20]. BMC’s success story will be emulated by others, and this is how scientific publishing will welcome a new category of Gold publishers, with technological and economic expertise in the distribution of digital scientific information on Health.

However, the Gold Author-Pays model raises questions about APC funding. The inequality of researchers in terms of access to information is now transformed into inequality in relation to publishing [BOU 17c]. Even though the Open Access model advocates access to knowledge, publishers are seizing on it to make it a new source of funding for their economic model. This is confirmed by the fact that the policies of some countries with a tradition of research and publication, such as the UK, officially opt for Gold Open Access as a strategic policy for the dissemination of scientific publications and provide, as a corollary, grants that allow researchers to publish according to this Gold Author-Pays model [FIN 12]. Since then, the major historical groups of scientific publishing (Elsevier, Wiley, Springer, etc.), the Gold publishers (PloS, Copernicus, etc.) and the international databases (Scopus, Web of Science, Dimensions, etc.) have set out to work on the development of Gold journals and their indexing, and thus on their economic valuation.

The evolution of the scientific publishing sector in the field of Health, subject to policy requirements, has therefore encouraged the development of the Gold model, and particularly the Gold Author-Pays model. According to Piwowar et al. [PIW 18], Health fields (biomedical research, clinical medicine, health, biology) are the disciplines in which there are the most Open Access scientific articles. Many studies have highlighted the strong growth of Open Access journals in the biomedical sciences since the beginning of 2002 [BOU 17a]. For example, more than half of all published scientific articles are available in Open Access [PIW 18].