Hi,

I was wondering if you to pay Journals to publish your articles (i.e. when they accept to publish them). The recent I am asking is because I did not think you had to pay but I found an Open Assess journal that was relevant to my topic and it states that you have to pay approx. 1,000 euro for article processing charges.

http://www.hindawi.com/journals/jbb/apc.html

A.

You should not have to pay anything. That sounds like a scam/not-good-journal to me.

No, it's not a scam. Open access journals meet their administrative costs by charging the author team for publication of the article, instead of the typical journal subscription. Your article should still be subjected to the same rigorous standards of peer review before it is accepted. Your university should pay for publication of the article, so don't go paying for it yourself.

Ah thanks Wally for that information :)

Thank you for answering my query !
:-)

I still think it sounds dodgy. First, since other journals don't charge the authors (or their university) surely people will stick to these "free" ones? Particularly as, from what I gather, hindawi journals are not well-established. Second, with these being online-only, what are the origin of these administrative costs? I thought academics peer-reviewed for free (feel free to correct me on this.) Third, is there not an incentive for hindawi to publish as many articles as possible and claim that they were peer-reviewed, or do people pay and then their paper gets rejected?

I generally wouldn't trust anything on the internet (or anything to do with academia) that has a revenue scheme like this.

I'm not defending the high charge levied or anything. I've just had experience of publishing an article in an open access journal (which has been going for less than 2 years) and the cost sounds about right. Open access is, as far as I'm aware, relatively new. But it's becoming increasingly significant, particularly in the medical sciences (Biomed). You've got a point about them trying to publish as many articles as possible to make more money, although if they start publishing substandard work it'll just mean that no-one reads it and the journal will get a bad reputation. Personally, I like open access. There's something really annoying about seeing a piece of research, wanting to read it and then coming up against a paywall because some man with a briefcase decides that you need to pay $30 for 24 hours of access.

It's also becoming more common for well established print/access only journals to offer an "Open Access" option with increased fees - the one I saw was about £800 for a leading journal in the area so a thousand euros sounds about right.

Of course a major drawback of this model is that it discriminates against independent researchers who work outside a university department. I'm in that situation, and would much rather pay a much more modest one-off fee to download an article I'm interested in reading than pay 1000 Euros to have my article published.

I'm with Wally here, the whole point of research and publishing is to bring new findings to light and inform people, and I don't see why this should be restricted to universities paying subscription fees or the individual willing to fork out a fortune to have access to new journals. Not everyone has access to uni subscriptions and having to pay for journal access is a major barrier to many independent researchers or people who like to read up the research about something they may have heard about. I'm all for open access journals myself.

And while the cost does seem very high, considering they still have to have editors etc and people to format papers for the website and run the whole thing, it's to be expected. Perhaps the cost will come down in the future when open access becomes more widely used, at the moment I'd say they aren't getting the same amount of revenue as print journals. Plus, print journals often have a page limit and extra charges for going over this or providing Appendices or colour images, which isn't an issue for open access journals, well, the ones in my field at least. Which is very handy for someone with heaps of background data and images and graphs that are much easier to interpret in colour... :)

But if you don't have a university to back you would you be willing to pay 1000 Euros to see an article of yours in print? It's a heck of an outlay.

I don't know about other areas, but certainly in the lifesciences, it is common to have to pay fees for publications, even in topflight, peer reviewed, subscription only journals, for things such as the number of images in the paper, and particularly if you want colour images etc. So even journals that rake the money in from extortionate subscriptions still make money from the authors too.

Open access is becoming more commonplace in biomed sciences, with some funding bodies insisting that publications from research they fund is published as open access, even if it is published in a subscription only journal, meaning the cost is picked up from the author (or more often the funding body).

I agree you as research student shouldn't have to pick up the bill for publishing, your institute or funding body should, but I wouldn't necessarily be put off by open access - the same peer review process should still be in place. I think impact factor, more than whether something is open access or not, has more of an effect on the perception of a journal.

Amy

======= Date Modified 06 Sep 2010 16:33:00 =======
well, that's an extremely good point Bilbo and you are right there, but you can still submit to a normal print journal in that case no? I think the journals having an open access option along with normal submission is the best way forward...

Sorry if I'm coming across all contrary today, but it doesn't discriminate against independent researchers. For the open access journal I submitted to, if you don't have the means to pay you can apply for a fee waiver. In addition, if you're (or a member of the author team) a member of a professional society (such as the nursing one, or the physiotherapy on), the society will cover the cost. The only downside is that the journals do tend to have lower impact factors than the subscription model ones. But hopefully that will change in the future.

Yes I can, and have. Since completing my PhD I've submitted two more journal papers recently to conventional print journals. Both are out with the referees now.

Open access as an optional extra sounds good, but I'd hate to see it become the default norm.