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Ouch. Open Access, yes, but...
Information about this came to me via an e-mail, and so I clicked the link for the "learn more" (even though the mail seemed to have listed everything), and then I scrolled down a bit, and then I found this small note about the APC. That's the "article processing fee". Which, in that case, is the utter pittance of approximately, converted, 1550 Euro.
Ouch.
So. Here's what I think: I'm all for open access and free access to knowledge, research, and research articles. I also know that there's some things that can be done for free, and some things that can't be done for free. I do firmly believe that if someone is spending their workdays doing work, the money that comes out of said work should be enough to live on. So yes, paying for work done on editing, layouting, and (if it's a physical thing) printing and the paper - that is something that has to happen.
However... a lot of the academic journals will ask a really hefty price for reading them, which in a lot of cases can (or will) only be paid by institutions. If I'm charged 30+ € for a 30-year-old article (to download the pdf, mind you, not a physical copy) my understanding of the pricing is somewhat challenged. I would have more understanding if I knew that the paper authors and the peer reviewers would actually see some of that money... but nope. Academic articles, and academic review work, is entirely unpaid.
Some journals have started to offer Open Access publishing in the past few years. The money, in those cases, is then asked from the authors of the papers - called "open access fee" or "article processing fee" or something along those lines. Yes, there are costs to publishing, even if it's only online and there are no printing costs... but really? I'm not able, nor willing, to pay more than a thousand Euros to publish an article.
There's so much public money wasted on so many stupid things. Sigh. Some of it would be well spent on making research more accessible to everyone...
Comments 2
There have been quite a few 'scam' offers like this going around the Internet over the last few decades. Basically they bulk email known academics offering to 'publish' their work for a fee on what sounds like a real academic site. The basic scam is for them just take the money & run. When the victim then looks further they find the site never was a real academic site or even in any way connected to a school, college or university, usually there is a single letter changed in a name. Others will actually put the article on line somewhere, often with fraudulent claims of peer review (the 'peers' have never heard of them) and no editing, and/or with malware embedded in either the site or download package. And they then have a real contract that gives them exclusive rights to the article so the author can't publish it on any legitimate site without paying an extortionate fee to the scammers to buy back their own work.
Yes, there's been a good amount of scammy offers around. In this case, though, I'm not sure it's a scam, though I don't know the journal and I did not take the time to look into it any further.
There's quite a few journals that post lots of things open access without a fee, but academic publishing has always been a somewhat special beast. I know of people who paid quite a lot to have their thesis published because the publisher had "a good name" and it was prestigious to be in print there. The thesis itself was not cheap to buy once it was on the market, too - and as far as I know, the authors never saw any of the book's profits. Things like that make me a little sad...