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A while ago, I spoke with a colleague of mine who advised me to beware of journals that require you to pay to publish your work, as they may be predatory. Today, I spoke with my advisor who informed me that even some reputable journals require payment to publish... even upwards of thousands of dollars! Is this really ethical? I can understand requiring a nominaly insignificant membership fee of some sort to keep the journal running, but such an exhorbitant amount? Shouldn't all who have significant work to publish in a field have the ability to diseminate in reputable journals without being super rich?

justhalf
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Paul
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    I am in math, and more and more journals offer an "Open Access" model where you can choose to pay them to publish your paper. If I have to pay someone to publish my paper, it tells me that there is negative demand for my research and I should be doing something else. – Stefan Smith Mar 08 '13 at 04:26
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    Plain, simple, and clear "NO". Tao and Gowers lost 2/3 of my respect for their pi and sigma. But remember that money is well above ethics on many publishers' list of priorities. – fedja Aug 28 '13 at 19:45

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Well someone's got to pay. If it's the reader, then howls go up about Open Access. So that leaves the authors.

The costs of publishing

A high-quality journal needs high-quality editors. An awful lot of literature still gets printed and distributed around the world and that's expensive. Remember, reading this, we are the ones who are most active online, and so our paper-reading habits are much more likely to be skewed towards predominantly (or even exclusively) online access, so are not fully representative. High-quality journals often also get involved in conference sponsorship, publicity, and so on. The peer-reviews get co-ordinated; there is often some vetting of suitable reviewers; their responses need to be interpreted correctly; special issues get co-ordinated; someone ensures a good balance of articles covering the journal's remit.

So, there's a lot of costs, and someone's got to cover them. If we want to publish at almost-zero overheads, we write a blog. A journal is much much more than a blog - and some of the things that make it much more than a blog, cost money.

Not necessarily an efficient market

That's not to say that in certain sectors, there isn't a market failure: some sectors do have suspiciously high profit margins. And market regulators should be looking at removing barriers to entry. Those barriers certainly aren't insurmountable, as notable new scientific publishers have emerged recently, with new business models: PLOS being an obvious example, founded in 2000 to support Open Access, and becoming a publisher in its own right in 2003; and now a serious player, using the author-pays model.

Author beware

There are also plenty of scammers using the author-pays model. So be careful out there. Talk to colleagues about who's reputable and who's not. Read the journals. And there are lists online of the disreputable publishers. Read more about that on this site at How do you judge the quality of a journal?

Community
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410 gone
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    "Well someone's got to pay": see, e.g., http://jocg.org/index.php/jocg/pages/view/finances2011 – Jukka Suomela Sep 06 '12 at 10:39
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    I really don't understand the need for open access fees. Usually open access papers are online only, and the peer review etc. is all done for free by academics - so that leaves a cost of $1000+ to host a single static pdf file on a web page. It's outrageously wasteful, and the entire system could be made obsolete by a single government or university deciding to fund something that's like arXiv.org but with a rigorous peer review system, if only the will was there. That's not to say author-pays isn't better than reader-pays - it's just that they're both kind of stupid in the internet age. – N. Virgo Sep 06 '12 at 11:11
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    @EnergyNumbers: If the costs to publish JOCG are hidden from the readers, the editors, and even the publishers, in what sense are they "costs"? (I'm on on the JOCG editorial board.) See also this account of a leading machine learning journal. Publishing a bare-bones journal just isn't that expensive. – JeffE Sep 06 '12 at 12:13
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    @EnergyNumbers if the bulk of the fees actually go towards the journal editors' salaries then fair enough (although it doesn't stop me from imagining a better system where these tasks are accomplished by the community instead using an online system, perhaps even something a bit like this site) - but I've a strong suspicion that in most cases the editor gets only a small cut. Do you know any cases where data is available on where the money from open access fees actually ends up? – N. Virgo Sep 06 '12 at 12:20
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    @JeffE because someone pays them, one way or another. They are real costs. Professional editing is a real cost. As are physical servers, typesetting, copy-editing. Yes, maybe some things (e.g. server administration) are done by volunteers, for a tiny number of journals - but that's not scalable. And I don't see where the barriers to entry for new market entrants are. Still, I realise that given the nature of this site and its active contributors, I'm getting downvoted, even though I still consider what I've written to be a useful answer. – 410 gone Sep 06 '12 at 12:52
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    @EnergyNumbers: Perhaps this varies by field, but in many fields, almost all of the costs you described are handled by volunteer editors. Many journals don't provide professional editing, and the typesetting and copy-editing is handled by the author. The barrier to entry is that journals depend on prestige; people have a strong incentive to continue publishing in the recognized top journals, and not in some up start journal. – Henry Sep 06 '12 at 13:53
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    @EnergyNumbers but that's not scalable — So lots of people keep saying; I keep waiting for evidence. – JeffE Sep 06 '12 at 14:13
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    I agree with EnergyNumbers here. Faculty are often attracted to models where no money changes hands but there's a lot of volunteer work, on the grounds that they control their time but not necessarily a budget. That's understandable, but it's often not the most efficient solution. (Faculty aren't necessarily good at these things or willing to do them, you don't want to create extra burden on the people who are, and in any case paying a professional is often cheaper than the implicit cost of the volunteer time.) – Anonymous Mathematician Sep 06 '12 at 14:21
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    @AnonymousMathematician: That seems like a possible argument for why journals should spend money on the things EnergyNumbers mentioned, but it doesn't address the fact that right now they generally don't. – Henry Sep 06 '12 at 14:40
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    Just a point: this is not volunteer work, this is work paid by the institution of the editors, reviewers and authors. But I think that this is a mission of research institutions to pay all the costs related to publications, preferably by running the journals and proceedings publishers (no need for a very costly "man"-in-the-middle). – Sylvain Peyronnet Sep 06 '12 at 19:45
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    Having had to read arXiv.org papers, I am surprised anyone still underestimates the value of paid page layout professionals. – Fomite Sep 07 '12 at 07:18
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    I can only speak for my own field (mathematics), but this is the advice I would give to mathematicians: never pay to publish your work in a journal. There are some math journals that are at the border of reputability that ask authors to pay, but if you read the fine print you see that they are not explicitly requiring you to pay. So don't pay, and if they publish your paper anyway, tell your friends about what happened. – Pete L. Clark Sep 09 '12 at 15:39
  • @Pete : Bravo ! – Stefan Smith Mar 08 '13 at 04:29
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    "Well someone's got to pay. If it's the reader, then howls go up about Open Access. So that leaves the authors." Gibberish! It is always assumed and openly proclaimed that the author will beg their department and NSF for money. The editors can do it themselves as well if their journal is any good. Sorry for the angry tone, but the point remains. – fedja Aug 28 '13 at 19:48
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A market in which authors pay to publish and their careers depend on the number of publications they have opens new possibilities for unethical practices, and those are being actively exploited by vanity press "gold open access" journals. On the other hand, there are very reputable journals like PlosONE that charge authors but maintain highly ethical standards.

Personally, I think open submission is even more important than open access. For a more thorough criticism of the author-pay model, see these articles from the Notices of the American Mathematical Society.

David Ketcheson
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This is an answer about the cost of publishing science article.

A math paper, where the author gives a pretty good draft (we use LaTeX) still has to manage peer-review (which usually means paying a secretary to contact authors, late referees, and so on) and to typeset articles. I have heard that the overall cost is $50 per page for a cheap journal (and math pages tend to be small since we mostly write with a single column).

It has been computed in the (very interesting) blog SV-POW that subscription earn the publisher more than $5000 on average. But of course, we are cheated a lot with those prices.

PLoS ONE gains money (and reinvest it, since PLoS is non-profit) and charges "only" $1350 per article.

Recently, Cambridge University Press announced the launch of a math journal in gold OA for $750 a paper -- after three years of fee waivers for everyone.

Last, PeerJ claims to be able to publish all the paper one wants for a few hundred dollar, paid once in one's life (plus yearly reviewer duty).

My conclusion: there is a wide range of prices, and a wide range of services a journal can provide, or not.

Concerning the actual question, I would say there is no ethical problem with paying a publisher for the work it does, as soon as the editors are independent from the money flow; but there are some issues with a system where most journals would run such a model.

Benoît Kloeckner
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It does make sense to pay but I think the fees now went through the roof.

for example BMJ charges 2500 british pounds (all article are forced into paying open access) and they still sell printed copies.

Hybrid model of optional payment for open access seems to be dying in favor of all open access and all journals charge an article fee.

(medical field answer)

userJT
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I don't think it is ethical to ask individuals to pay to publish papers. If anything they should be paid for their contribution to the journal. If anyone should pay it should be the reader...subscription fees etc

NRA
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