One of the weirdest aspects of academia, to me, is the finances of papers and grants. The short version of this page is “Don’t pay to access articles”. Below, I explain why.
When I write a paper, the process is:
- I have grant money to pay my salary and pay for my research (or I’m working for someone else who has a grant to pay my salary and pay for my research)
- Once I’m done, I submit my paper to a journal, basically saying “I think my work is cool and important, and I want you to help me make sure it’s great, then put your stamp of approval on it, and help me share it with the world”.
- The journal sends the manuscript of my paper out to other scientists, who for free, review my paper. They read it carefully, they think about how I did my work and how I interpret my findings, and also how I present my ideas to the reader. They give feedback to the journal editor (who generally is paid), and the editor gets back to me. If the editor and reviewers liked what I did, we have several rounds of feedback and revisions to improve the manuscript (and maybe do some additional analyses or gather a bit more data), and then it’s time to publish!
- Now I pay the journal quite a bit of money (hundreds to thousands of dollars) for the “publication fee”. (this is generally paid through a grant. I have not paid from my own personal finances, and do not intend to. Sometimes this fee is also waived – see below). This fee hypothetically covers the cost of typesetting, supports the editors and the journal staff, etc.
- Now the journal typesets (does the pretty formatting on) and publishes the paper!
So far so good. It’s a little complicated, and involves some generosity on the side of the scientists acting as reviewers (I’ve done this about a dozen times as of this writing – you don’t get paid, but you work and think hard to help someone else make their science better). But it generally works.
Here’s the part that’s weird: after charging me to publish my paper, the journal now charges anyone who wants to read my paper. I really liked this explanation, in simple terms:
Generally, universities and other research institutes negotiate with journals and pay a big licensing fee so that everyone associated with that institute can access papers for free. For example, I’m currently a part of Tufts University, and through Tufts I get free access to most papers. Since a sizable chunk of most grants actually goes to the university or research institute as “overhead” (like, 40-60% of a grant at many places), researchers are indirectly covering these access fees through their grants.
But if you’re not part of a research institute that gives you free access? You’re looking at a massive price-tag for a few pages of writing.
It’s important to note that none of this money goes back to the author. This is just profits for the journals.
The catch
Journals almost invariably give authors the right to share their work for free either via email, or hosted on their own website. So even though Theoretical Ecology wants you to pay them $40 to access my paper, you can also email me about it, and I can send it to you for free. Perfectly legally. I can even host these papers on my own site, generally!
Not all journals are evil
The financial structure of publishing and journal access is weird and complicated, but I don’t mean to demonize all journals. In a perfect world, journals play an important role in helping to filter through research – separating real research from falsehoods or overly-enthusiastic claims, and helping scientists improve both their work and the way they present it. They also typeset the paper (turn it from a word document into the pretty shape of a published paper) and host the article. None of this is free (except for the bits that they get other scientists to do for free). Many journals are non-profit or not-for-profit, and these (a) tend to charge less, (b) tend to put the money they earn back into programs to support scientists, and (c) usually completely waive publishing fees for the first publication in a year. (For example, I recently published a paper in the American Naturalist journal, where the publication charge is $75/page, but the fee was waived entirely because this was my first paper with them this year). Even for-profit journals can be just fine – publishing giant Springer, for example, has generally gone out of their way to make science accessible.
Many journals also offer the option to publish papers as “open access” – the authors pay more, but anyone can read the article for free. This is great in theory. If I use taxpayer’s grant money to pay to publish my research (which was also paid for by taypayer’s grant money), I feel like anyone should be able to read the article for free. But the open access fee can be a LOT. For example, the journal Nature Communication is all open access, and charges $5,380 to publish with them.
There certainly are egregious problems in the publishing system. There are predatory journals that pretend to do peer review (the value that journals provide), but skip that part and just charge authors. There are also slimy publishing systems that take advantage of the free work of reviewers, and charge unreasonable rates to universities that want to access their journals (for example, in 2019 the University of California terminated their contract with publishing giant Elsevier because of ridiculous profit-seeking acts). It’s not all rainbows and butterflies.
But the important part is that, regardless of whether a journal is a wonderful nonprofit branch of an academic society like the American Naturalist, or something sketchier like one of Elsevier’s many tentacle-y arms, you personally should not be paying to read the articles in the journal. Shoot an email to the author, or look on their personal website (and sometimes the academic branch of google, google scholar, will have already found a pdf of the paper on the author’s website). I am incredibly excited to share my work with you, and I’m not alone.
