Some open access journals charge authors. But these open access journals are not the publishers we hear about (such as Elsevier). In some ways, it's accurate to say that the old model with publishers is "reader pays", and the open access model is "author pays".
The good thing about open access journals is that they are typically not a for-profit endeavor. This means that what they will charge to the authors is, hopefully, reasonable.
When was the last time you published in a traditional journal? Last I saw an invoice was 4 years ago and we paid to be published in journals that were pay-only.
This year; it was IEEE, which counts as "traditional" for my field. Computer science is different from most other science and engineering though, since most of our conferences and journals are run through our professional organizations (ACM and IEEE), not a for-profit company.
Sadly you are wrong. Elsevier, Springer, Wiley, etc. they all have (what they call) "open access" journals where you have to pay to publish, and even some "authors choses" journal where you can pay to make your article freely available on the web but also choose the "free" closed access option. And yes, this means that universities still have to pay the subscriptions to these journals because not all of their papers are open access, so you end up paying one more time…
I'm insisting here on the fact that publishers attempt to melt the notion of "open access" and "gold open access" with author processing charges, but this is manipulative propaganda (and sadly it works, lobbies at EU and in the US succeed in convincing politics and funding agencies that they have to pay to publish in "open access").
Conflating OA with APCs isn't a nefarious PR campaign by the paywall publishers (disclaimer: I'm affiliated with one). It's the only way that anyone has shown is a sustainable model (so far). PLoS is the prime non-profit example, Hindawi is a for-profit OA example, and there are countless others that all focus on APCs being the mechanism to sustain OA publication (some call them different things, like PeerJ's membership model). Granted, I'm sure you can find examples of individual societies choosing to provide a high quality OA journal without the use of APCs, but that's the exception, not the rule. But overall the meteoric rise (and financial success) of non-profit PLoS seems like the biggest contributor to "OA = APCs".
I really think what you say here is deeply ideological. As I explained in another comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8657030), there exist ways to have high quality OA venues at a fraction of the cost per publication that are demanded by gold/APCs OA publishers. You can read more about these models by googling for Diamond Open Access and Platinum Open Access (and see very successful and large scale exemples such as SciELO and revues.org).
I was unaware that the old publishers had co-opted the label "open-access". But it is still true that some "true" open access journals require author fees - there's no free lunch.
Sorry for the messed up formatting, I used a star in the parenthesis and at the beginning of the second paragraph to mark a footnote. I can't edit it anymore.
Some open access journals charge authors. But these open access journals are not the publishers we hear about (such as Elsevier). In some ways, it's accurate to say that the old model with publishers is "reader pays", and the open access model is "author pays".
The good thing about open access journals is that they are typically not a for-profit endeavor. This means that what they will charge to the authors is, hopefully, reasonable.