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Comment by drb493 | Hacker News Reader

Kudos to the editors for taking a stand.

Absurd cost for publications was a major reason I left academia as a postdoc. Senior scientists with large grants and salaries write it off as a business expense but paying 2-3k for a paper is insane for junior staff that are already being underpaid.

Arxiv and opensource publishing options exist. But for neuroscience, the funding and direction of research is implicitly governed by the reviewers and chief editors whom are embedded in these journals. Thus for your work to get exposure and citations it is critical to publish in the given journal for your domain.

Journals have a reciprocal relationship with chief editors in that journals will publish "special" editions essentially allowing the editors to publish their work with their collaborators carte blanche. Switching to an open source model is objectively a better option, but there are entrenched incentives that prohibit this change.

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Salaries and underpaid? Not relevant since no one pays open-access charges with their own money. It always comes from the funding.

It comes out of the grant that also pays salaries, so excessive paper costs might mean that a research group can't afford to pay as many postdocs and grad students.

Or can't afford to pay the postdocs and grad students they do have what they are worth.

They already don't

Absolutely relevant. Had a huge issue with the University recently about being able to publish in a journal because they wouldn't pay the fees - every point at which there can be a problem, there will be.

So you had issues using your funding to pay for open-access fees. Are you going to use your own money to pay the fees? You are not. You'll just submit the paper as non open-access. So your salary is not relevant here.

No, the funding body specifies that all work has to be published as open-access. So if you publish without open access, you are getting yourself into trouble with the funding bodies which is a bad idea.

Sure I get all that but you are literally never in any situation going to use your own money to pay for open-access fees. If you actually did that, sure, let me know lol.

I'm struggling to understand what happened from your comments.

So your funding source requires publishing as open access. (This is generally good imo, but details matter and challenges may remain.) But when you tried to publish in your selected journal the university objected... to what exactly? Allocating funds from the grant to pay for the publishing fee? Or did they have to pay out of pocket?

A funding body grants you money and demands open-access. They often state very clearly that costs for publications (submission or publication fees, open access fees etc) cannot be paid from grant money. Thus, you need another source. The first address is your institute / department / faculty / university. If they decline to pay the open access fee, you are in trouble.

That’s actually common practice in a lot of fields.

> A funding body grants you money and demands open-access. They often state very clearly that costs for publications (submission or publication fees, open access fees etc) cannot be paid from grant money.

I don't believe you. Show me one source for this, and from a decently sized funding body if it's such common practice.

> They often state very clearly that costs for publications (submission or publication fees, open access fees etc) cannot be paid from grant money.

I think you've been misinformed. At least in the US, EU, Canada, and Australia, that's just not true. Public or private funders are telling grant writers to put open access publication costs in their budget or have other funds to pay for them. I only speak English, I'm so unsure of other non-EU countries. But this took just a few minutes of searching to find each agency's official policy or advice to grantwriters on this:

US NSF: "The proposal budget may request funds for the costs of documenting, preparing, publishing or otherwise making available to others the findings and products of the work conducted under the grant. This generally includes the following types of activities: reports, reprints, page charges or other journal costs" [1]

US NIH: "NIH continues its practice of allowing publication costs, including author fees, to be reimbursed from NIH awards." [2]

EU ERC: "publishing costs (including open access fees) and costs associated to research data management may be eligible costs that can be charged against ERC grants, provided they are incurred during the duration of the project and the specific eligibility conditions of the applicable Model Grant Agreement are fulfilled" [3]

All Canadian government research funding: "Some journals may require researchers to pay article processing charges (APCs) to make articles freely available. Costs associated with open access publishing are considered by the Agencies to be eligible grant expenses" [4]

Australia National Health and Medical Research Council "over the grant lifetime, funds can be used to support costs associated with publications and open access such as article processing charges, which are the result of the research activity and which are in accordance with the DRC Principles." [5]

Gates Foundation: "The Foundation Will Pay Necessary Fees. The foundation shall pay reasonable fees required by a publisher or repository to effect immediate, open access to the accepted article. This includes article processing charges and other publisher fees. " [6]

Howard Hughes Medical Institute: "May use their HHMI budget to pay publication fees charged by open access journals" [7]

[1] https://www.nsf.gov/pubs/policydocs/pappg18_1/pappg_2.jsp#II...

[2] https://publicaccess.nih.gov/faq.htm

[3] https://erc.europa.eu/sites/default/files/document/file/ERC_...

[4] https://science.gc.ca/site/science/en/interagency-research-f...

[5] https://www.nhmrc.gov.au/file/18478/download?token=xCagap4H

[6] https://openaccess.gatesfoundation.org/open-access-policy/

[7] https://hhmicdn.blob.core.windows.net/policies/Open-Access-T...

I (as a Ph.D student) paid open access fees with my own money. Not grant money, my own salary.

That was a huge mistake on your part. You should never do that. If it's required by your grant, then get them to pay for it. If it's not required, then publish non open-access.

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