Compared to the current state across nearly all academic fields, that is leaps and bounds more open. Outside of narrow fields, it was often the case that you w

Compared to the current state across nearly all academic fields, that is leaps and bounds more open. Outside of narrow fields, it was often the case that you would need to cough up an amount in the thousands to publish as open-access. Check out Elsevier's own page (https://www.elsevier.com/about/open-science/open-access https://www.elsevier.com/about/open-science/open-access) where they list a price between $150 USD and $6000 USD depending on journal and article. On that page you can find a pricing sheet where out of 2340 journals they list, only 83 have an open-access fee of less than $1000 USD. Springer Nature's fees seem similar, so hopefully this agreement brings down the cost as well. The whole of academic publishing is a mess, and really needs large universities pushing the open access agenda. In a perfect world, academic journals would be run by non-profit entities and exist solely for the betterment of academia, but sadly large publishers like Elsevier turn billions in profit each year, lining their pockets with money leeched out of grants and universities.