Volunteer Effort
Voluntary work characterised the early stage of OA journal development. Initially, a large percentage of the OA journals were new born electronic only journals established by independent academics, which did not charge authors for publishing and were based on volunteer effort.660 According to Björk, the voluntary work model is operable for small journals but does not scale to bigger journals for which a steady income is necessary.661 A slight variation of this model has seen editorial staff being provided with an honorarium for their activities, which is usually given by an external sponsor.662