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Comment by attractivechaos | Hacker News Reader

The majority of journals I know provide an open-access option: you pay a few thousand dollars publication fee such that everyone else in the world can read the electronic version for free. PNAS has this option. Nature, I believe, make an article free in several months/a year if you opt to open access. A few funding bodies, such as Wellcome Trust, have requested to publish in the open access model for several years (these funding bodies pay for the publication fee as long as you can get your paper accepted). I am not sure what the Gates foundation is doing differently here.

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Note that, to a lab just starting out "A few thousand dollars" is a non-trivial expenditure.

Yeah. Understand that. But journals are not charity. Someone has to pay for publication and distribution. It is either readers, authors or funding providers. Or you could get rid of the costly midman/publishers, but I am not sure an academic world with preprint servers only would be a better one.

Some countries/universities have reserved pots of money for OA fees, sadly it isn't common.

I have myself published a few papers with PhD students that should have been OA but we used the PhD students' allocated funds to send that student to a relevant conference, that's a better prospect for their career.

Yeah - this is mostly me grumbling in the direction of "Oh, I only publish in open access journals..." types who have tenure and funded R01s

Any OA publisher worth their salt offers a fee waiver program, and the expectation 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 available to take care of OA fees and to help direct publishing scientists to non-predatory publishers (Elsevier in particular can charge obscene OA fees, giving OA in general a bad name, which works to their benefit!)and also pick up the tab.

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