Open Access accounting?

Springer now provides a choice for authors to have their publication in any Springer journal appear as an open access article. As in many other open access journals, the author is charged a fee. In this case the fee is $3000 in addition to any usually author-borne publication costs. So, are the libraries gong to pay as much to Springer as before or does the additional funding reduce costs? Springer claims that it does. Is anyone willing to bet that costs will be less than the current costs plus inflation?

Technorati Tags: economics, Open Access