  The article focuses on possible financial effects of the transformation
towards Gold Open Access publishing based on article processing charges and
studies an aspect that has so far been overlooked: Do possible cost sharing
models lead to the same overall expenses or do they result in different
financial burdens for the research institutions involved? It takes the current
state of Gold OA publishing as a starting point, develops five possible models
of attributing costs based on different author roles, number of authors and
author-address-combinations. The analysis of the distributional effects of the
application of the different models shows that all models result in similar
expenditures for the overwhelming majority of institutions. Still, there are
some research institutions where the difference between most and least
expensive model results in a considerable amount of money. Given that the model
calculation only considers publications that are Open Access and where all
authors come from Germany, it is likely that different cost sharing models will
become an issue in the debate on how to shoulder a possible large scale
transformation towards Open Access based on publication fees.
