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Comment by MattGaiser | Hacker News Reader

Is it normal for journals to charge a fee for publishing?

Yes. Academic publishing is a bizarre market. Editors and referees volunteer their time. Authors pay to publish. Libraries pay for subscriptions so that researchers can read. Publishers handle distribution, but in a digital-first era that's mostly pure profit.

This is normal practice. To publish in a respectable journal you are charged £1000+. To publish your paper as open access, you can be charged another ~£1000 for the privledge (IEEE).

And the reviewers will get exactly zero out of this

Depends on the field. For example, practically all of machine learning and related fields are $0 to publish and are open access by default. It’s been a huge boon for everyone except I guess traditional publishers.

>It’s been a huge boon for everyone except I guess traditional publishers.

My heart bleeds for them!

I think it's laughable they still charge extra for color pictures.

They charge extra to have your pictures printed in color, online everything is in color anyway. I think that is a fair practice no?

No. If you want to submit color regardless of medium. Besides, color printing isn't that costly compared to their high margins. It's in their favor too if people use color images, the age of simple scatterplots has passed for most fields.

Never encountered paying for non-open access publication. I have only encountered "article processing fees" in relation to open access publishing.

If you're okay with having your paper paywalled, you do not need to pay for journal publication.

So I'm curious in which domain/subdomain you have encountered this.

In my area of semiconductor engineering/ detectors, we generally have to pay to publish. Journals do seem to be slowly moving away from this for just the publication, however as you say for open access you still need to pay. Depending on the funding provider for the research, it can be compulsory for the papers to be open access, so we would end up paying anyway.

This is a relatively new practice, invented by Robert Maxwell in the 1950s or so.

And I see all these people cautioning against publishing in predatory journals, which can be distinguished by the fact they require me to pay to publish. Then we have the big respectable journals which also require payment to publish. Hmm...sounds like the only real difference is the respectable journals are considered respectable and the predatory journals are considered predatory...

It's only normal for open access journals to charge (or making a paper in a traditional journal open-acess), as the journals cannot sell access to the article. And the fees are usually a few thousand.

Of course it's also most common for "predatory" journals to be open access and charge thousands.

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