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Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

Note that "open access" in the context of academic publishing is a weasel word: it means that the submitters of the article have to pay for it instead of the readers. This can be quite expensive, hence the invention of predatory journals who want the money.

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While this is true on its face, any OA publisher worth their salt offers a fee waiver program, and the expection from Day 1 of OA has been that these costs should be baked into grant applications and funding requests. Many funding bodies and institutions take care of this for you, having OA funds and assistance to take care of OA fees and to help direct publishing scientists to non-predatory publishers (Elsevier in particular can charge obscene OA fees)and also pick up the tab.

As such, it is very unusual for a Submitting author to have to pay an OA charge.

COI statement: I used to work for an OA-only publisher, but have not been employed there for the last 2 years.

The ones who offered fee waiver programs weren't on his list, because they weren't predatory. For example, PNAS may not be a great journal, but it's OpenAcess and not predatory... hundreds of others with very similar names to high profile journals and fake conferences are predatory.

I wouldn't say that it's rare to have to pay (even for a non-free journal)... in fact it may be more common to pay just based on the number of predatory journals and their published articles, it just isn't ethical (either for the publisher or often for the writer).

Uh, submitters typically pay for all submissions, either in cash or in the requirement to sign over copyright to the journal.

Open Access is a trend to combatting the walled garden model of scientific publishing, and is perfectly legitimate.

Scammy journals are taking advantage of authors' needs to publish a lot of work in order to advance in their field. They are "open access" not because open access is a scam, but because the journal is a scam and it's hard to get people to pay for subscriptions to a scam journal.

"Uh, submitters typically pay for all submissions, either in cash or in the requirement to sign over copyright to the journal."

Yes. Even with "reputable" journals, the revenue flow often works like this:

1) The researcher does the research and writes the paper (usually at public expense). 2) The researcher submits the paper to a journal (often along with a hefty "publication fee"), where it is edited and peer-reviewed for "free" (i.e., also at public expense) by researchers at other institutions. 3) The researcher signs over the copyright to the journal. 4) The journal then charges other researchers, libraries, and the public (who have basically footed all the bills so far) another hefty fee if they want to read the paper.

That's the standard model. Beall's list was of journals that were abusive even by those standards.

I have never submitted a paper anywhere that had a publication fee. You generally pay to submit xor you pay to read, the and case is a distinct minority.

Maybe it depends on the field? Every journal I've submitted to (chemistry/physical chemistry) only asked for money after peer-review and acceptance. And these are the well-respected journals in the field.

You can find a number of reputable journals that charge publication fees, yet still don't make the articles open access.

Google ["page fees"], and you'll find a whole bunch of them.

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