Although it is not a justified way of asking the fee,the organisation concern should seek the funds.

Personally I am not against publication fees if it isn't to high but I don't support paying handling charges

I think that you are contributing your precious research work to research journals and without publishing research work research journals are nothing. So, there should be no publication charges.

Many low grade journals exist only to charge fee & publish work no matter of what quality or authentic the work has been. I totally disagree with this idea.

The original idea of this new way of publishing (called Open Access) was to make it easier for low-income societies to participate in global knowledge. Commercial mainstream publishing companies charge far more than typical OA publishers, see

http://www.doaj.org/doaj?func=byPublicationFee&uiLanguage=en (here it is also shown that most OA journals do not charge fees). The mainstream business model uses your institutional budget to let you buy back what you have already published through increasingly high subscription fees. I don't favor this model and try to go for Open Access, whenever possible.

Usama is right in saying that there are OA journals with questionable quality. You can find them on Beall's list of predatory publishers (cited several times here on RG). Stay away from those publishers and journals but stick to the good quality OA journals, if you can.

I also say that open access is good as everybody can access the papers easily. But paying for open access doesn't make sense in any case. Who will need to buy his own paper when most of the journals provide a complementary pdf to the authors? Otherwise also authors have their own data to cite after publication. Authors have sufficient proofs of publication once a paper is accepted. Question is whether this fee system is good enough to be justified.

Open access publishing (OA) is often expensive for the authors and often publishes bad science. This is true. Yet, there is one essential and important advantage of online publishing: a scientist can have immediate access to the scientific paper that s/he needs. This facilitates knowledge acquisition. Such access to knowledge should be, in principle, free and available to everybody, including the third world countries. On the other hand publishing costs and is impossible to do it in free time by the volunteers only. In addition, the scientists know that they could write anything and will be able to publish it somewhere, and that no one will read it, but this will help them in their career anyway. The problem has its ramifications, but this is where the system brakes and we face an immense production of journals and articles and a flood of miserable science that frustrates the scientific community. As a result, there is less and less confidence in the published results. Published science and OA in particular has become profitable business and is unreliable – but this does not have to be as it is.

The academic institutions are guilty for bad publishing because the way how the scientific output is estimated is miserable. The academic institutions and all those that use the results of scientific work in one way or another, should evaluate science as they are supposed to: NOT by using short superficial procedures (number of publications, IF, h-index and similar) but they should examine in dept, examine the scientific product (papers, career of the scientists etc). If this would be done so, the result would be different: the scientists would again, as this used to be in the past, care about what they publish and where they publish, because their work will be read and judged! The journals would know that the papers would mirror the coherency and the scientific profiles of the authors and the confidence and trust between authors and journals would be reestablished. This would in turn calm the “publish or perish” fewer, diminish the demand for more publishing houses, diminish wild publishing and the online publishing could then become possible to finance by the academic institutions or charity, and make it free open access. This is what I believe.

@Alok,

I am not in favor of paying publication or processing fee. But need of the hour is to find out the reasons that why people are paying to publish their research work.

@ M. Sidhu... You have raised a very legitimate question but I think the compulsion of having publications out of the research work along with thesis submission makes the young researchers to take such involuntary decisions to pay and publish. Otherwise nobody would be interested in paying for publishing. This situation is being exploited by the new journals (online journals as well as non-peer reviewed) which charge fees in one form or the other.

@Alok,

I agree with you that there are some requirements of published research work at the time of submission of thesis. But I think that can be met during the investigation period in most of the cases. We should encourage and help the young researchers and colleague to publish their valuable findings in journals without paying fee.

@Dr. Devang Pandya,

You are of the opinion that fee is justifiable if the journal is reputed one. I think journals of the best repute like NATURE and SCIENCE charge nothing to publish in these journals. Please correct me if it is not so. There are large number of other reputed journal which do not take any fee.

@ M. Sidhu ... I agree with you Sir. I also got them published during the course of my PhD only although their was no such obligation in my university that time. But it also depends upon the guidance and the work. Many times students are not in a position to get it published till the last time also. Then they will try their best to get it done by hooks or by crooks. This is where this journals come into picture. Actually this is something very weird which I have witnessed. Then their research gets published in such low end journals which even they themselves hesitate to include in their CV. This is a fact I have seen myself. But at that time the priorities are different and the need of the hour becomes not quality paper but just paper.

Problem can only be fixed when a person decides that he is not going to pay in any form for publishing a paper. Anyways this were some of the probable reasons as you asked for in your first answer.

The allegedly ”good” journals do not charge publication fees (some do!) but this has nothing to do with the fact that they are of high reputation. They can afford this because they are often supported from outside (university or similar) and/or because they sell their services and are mainly NOT free OA! Publishing a journal (also online journal) costs money and if a journal intends to be serious could not rely on 100% voluntary work. Therefore the editors have to charge for publishing. Or the work will be badly done, low quality papers acceptance will be high, and we will have bad journals, as we actually have.

Would you pay 500 Euros to publish in “Nature”? Think about. As you have seen so often, number of online open access journals charge publication fees and still are badly organized probably just because the shortage of stuff and financial problems. And these things then go further around and there is not 1 million dollars solution to the problem. In the end you will need money to publish. On the other hand why should one journal publish our paper? Because our paper will sell the journal? NO. Majority of our papers are just not interesting at all to be able to attract customers and sell the journal. And yet we, the costumers, we want the journals to be free! This is a naïve contradiction. The solution may be simple: let us not try all the time to publish, publish, publish anything! Let us be fair, honest, coherent, realists, men of character and submit ONLY really good papers. We would then have 1 paper per year and just good journals around, even those that would publish anything if paid for this would be like “Science” and “Nature”. There will even not be bad papers offered to publish. Scientific paradise. And in the end we will accept to pay to publish in a really “good” OA journal!

@Dragan Pavlovic,

Sir you have written that "Majority of our papers are just not interesting at all to be able to attract customers and sell the journal.".

I want to know that if this is the situation, for what purpose these types of papers are published by the journal.

There are different motives to publish a journal. To promote knowledge and promote science is one. Publishing such journal is seldom a good affair because more narrow the field is the audience attracted to the journal is smaller. Academic institutions support such a noble task and then can publish the articles that have scientific values which will be appreciated by quite small audience and certainly will lose money. A journal that is not specialized (Nature and Science) would have better chances to attract enough customers but it has to have a large section that is accessible to almost everybody. There are plenty of different motives and ways to publish a journal and even make money. As you certainly know, number of journals would publish anything – if the authors would pay. This is the other side of the problem, one that we discuss here and now. See the paper that is actually discussed a lot: John Bohannon: Who’s Afraid of Peer Review? A spoof paper concocted by Science reveals little or no scrutiny at many open-access journals, Science, 342: 60-65 (4 OCTOBER), 2013. Free online: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6154/60.full.pdf.

@Dragon Pavlovic... After reading this paper I am really surprised. I would like to quote some lines from this paper and would suggest everybody to read the full paper too:

"From humble and idealistic beginnings a decade ago, open access scientific journals have mushroomed into a global industry, driven by author publication fees rather than traditional subscriptions. Most of the players are murky. The identity and location of the journals’ editors, as well as the financial workings of their publishers, are often purposefully obscured."

@Dragan Pavlovic,

Sir, thanks for your words and information.

There is nothing free in the world today. I think it is fair the fees to cover the production cost.

Free,i would like.

Paper, not for make money, for share idea with others.

We just find journal which is a way to let others know us.

Now, in the same line, what do you think regarding a certain museum imposes the so-called bench fees in order to examine specimens in their collection? They said it is to cover maintenance cost!

Well as the previous threads maintain defraying the printing cost is a big problem for the journals as everything digital is preferred. A lot of journals are losing their print subscriptions and only digital subscriptions by the academic institutions are what is supporting them. So in this era some of the journals are thinking of either to shut down the print version and go completely digital. Even in the case of digital publications the server costs are significant so the smaller and newer journals which have no financial supports from the advertisements or sponsors resort to the publication charge. It is, however, possible that some of the journals overcharge and go for a profit margin. So one has to be careful, also in lot of these journals peer reviewing systems are very very weak and almost anything can be published as long as the authors pay the fees. Another thing is technically when you pay for publication of an article it becomes an advertisement even though it is of not much significance

Nothing new from above comments. I feel that one should write a quality paper and submit the same to the Journal, that could be best for the same.

It is true that a publisher is not a fool, neither is an author. Some Journals are funded by government of their respective states/countries, but some are not. In this case, there must be some source of income for the people working in that particular organization (in this case publishing firm), so the problem is how to manage that cost. Either they ask the authors to pay or otherwise from readers they ask. In both the cases, there are limits.

All researchers are not economically sound, some are graduate students and some little higher, for them to subscribe for a journal is tough, if their university have not subscribed for the same. But they can access freely available journals with an ease. Kindly note, the quality of journals does not depend upon the fact, whether it is freely accessible or not, but it depends upon the contents of the same.

For freely accessible journal too, a publisher needs a board of members, who can review the papers, comment and other important tasks too, and in return they need honorarium too, as they deserve. For this, a publisher needs a financial support, and if that support is not from government, he have to charge it from Authors.

Recently, it has also been reported that some people have started business of publishing papers, which are degrading the value of the real researches.

I think, today's need is that, there must be a body or organization to check the level of journals, and ban those journals involved in this sort of activity, which in turn solve the questions of the authors, researchers, why must we pay, and how much we pay for for my research to be published in freely accessible Journal.

In addition, I support that the journals WHICH ARE NOT freely accessible, SHOULD NOT charge any type of fee from authors.

I think a lot of researchers have been deceived by economists interests.

For me, my research is valuable and therefore, I don't have to pay anything to present it to the public.

For me I think paying within 100 dollars is OK. But 500 dollars is self-defeating. This is because paying 100 dollars is like paying 200 dollars what with bank charges and all. High costs will drive good science back into walled gardens!!!

As per my view....a sprouting researcher think over the early publication of his research or review article. In process of this view he/she wants to go for paid journals, beacause, they will give prompt reply to the authors and paying upto 50 to 100 dollars is justifiable. In my experience, I have sent one research article to one non paid journal before five months, up to now they didn't revert me. Moreover, it's not a simple task to maintain huge database with free of cost.

Limited charges are suitable idea but as mentioned above, it has become a profitable business by some publishers. A well established check is need of the time.Those journals should be free which are funded by theire organizations.

I am agree with Syed Umer sir but it should be affordable not out of reach.

Publishing should be free of charges !

In my opinion, journals that are not sponsored have to charge some minimal amount for publishing to cover up their expenses. But it should not be a profit making business, and all articles should be openly accessible.

Although it is not a justified way of asking the fee,the organisation concern should seek the funds.

I agree with N. Manika and John Anyam. The payment when is very high you will add contributors in order to spread the cost in addition 100 or 200 dollars is a lot of money in Nigerian currency too and when the money is paid by a young researcher then the issue because almost a no-go area. It should be free when sponsored by organizations but could charge minimal production cost.

I treat most journals requesting publication or processing fee with suspicion, and my fear has been confirmed in most cases because most of them are actually unacceptable with the quality of peer review they offer. I have had to wait for more than 7 months on 2 or more manuscripts with different journals, and one manuscript had to be subjected to more than 2 sessions of peer review before it was accepted. Nonetheless, I think they are worthy of being good journals because of the final outputs which are clearly more satisfactory than most of the suspect journals that request for money. I consider quality journals that request for publication fee as unfair too, because it is an unfair treatment to work hard for good research results, work hard to get the report in a manuscript only to be asked to pay again to get it published. I think it is very unfair and unacceptable. Hence, I rarely publish in them. Besides, if publishers request for money I think reviewers should be paid too! What some of these fee-requesting-journals do is to give reviewers some price reduction as a bait to publish with them, and I consider this as an unfair trick too. If I must pay to publish, I think journals should pay me for taking time off to review for them too!

Processing charges should be justifiable not profitable

There are so many students who can't afford to pay for publishing and amongst those who pay, there are many who have this feeling that it is because of the money that the paper has been published not for the quality of paper. I am of the opinion that there should be no publication fee and every journal should move towards open access. Most of the journals are already being paid by the institutes in the form of annual subscriptions so in spite of being a close access journal, if they ask fee for publication, it is not justified. It would be great if every journal works on getting sponsorship from industries/institutes to get the money and become open access.

I think journals are right in asking fees, provided it should be reasonable. Ultimately, every journal cannot get sponsorship. In such case, it makes sense to ask for fees. Some journals even ask specific amount to get article published.

In my opinion it's better to charge money for publishing to maintain their journal,but they must be access free of cost online for researchers.In my view it must not be profit organization.Unfortunately now this is the huge business which will reduce the quality of research......

I agree with Javeed War suggestion. There should be no publishing cost for publishing your research. Infact, in addition to the cost, there are many Journals which publishes low quality research with high cost and the results literally misleaded many researchers. Most of the research papers got published without peer review (for say......YOU PAY, YOU PUBLISH). That means no referee/peer reviewing was done. Hence, in my opinion, to improve the level of research and development, if the Journal is seeking publishing fee, then the quality should also be guaranteed.

I think fee should be marginal and it should address regional concerns. Researchers from developing countries like ours cannot afford to pay in dollars. Besides, there will be a request from the authors to take their writing and editing services who charge exorbitant amounts. Hence, most of the researchers end up in publishing in journals which they can afford.

These journals are not well recognized but affordable. My experience and I have heard from my colleagues, about certain Pubmed indexed speciality journal, kept my research work for months together under editorial and peer review; only one reviewer was sending the review, finally it was rejected after many months in the review.

The comment was that your work is unscientific despite the fact that very same work bagged the first prize in the same speciality conference. I did not know why they did not reject upfront. We can hand pick many articles from the very same journal which are published for the reasons best known to the editor.

This might look like a trivial issue, but, truth is, the publication fee issue is not the only issue that needs attention. Some journals advertise falsified information regarding their indexing and impact factor , which new or inexperienced author fall prey to.