Hi, all. This may be a relatively small issue compared to others in the OA world, but I thought it was worth raising.

My institution participates in some consortium-negotiated "Big Deals" (journal packages) that include OA APC discounts/waivers.

We have a discount on Journal X from Publisher Y because of a Deal with Y that we subscribe to.

The deal includes the instructions that the discount will automatically be offered when the submitting author is eligible for it based on their institution.

I just got contacted by a prof at my institution who has co-authored a paper with a prof at another institution who is not in the Y deal.

They submitted the paper to X but it was the other prof who submitted it and thus was not offered the discount, and declined the OA option because of the cost.

My prof contacted me for clarification about the discount.

This led to an email exchange in which my best advice was to withdraw or modify the submission to put my prof as the submitting author to get the discount.

I admit to not knowing enough about the process of submitting an article with multiple authors, but I am generally aware that certain authorship roles carry status - obviously "first author" does, but I don't know if "corresponding author" also does, nor if being the one who submits it makes one the "corresponding author".

But if my advice leads that team to rearrange their author roles to get the discount, doesn't that mean that the financial aspect is in some way interfering with the long-term scholarly record of the roles of the authors?

Help me out with my ignorance here, am I heading towards anything meaningful with these thoughts?