Lab (sometimes Department) pays to submit articles.
These are wholly different budgets. Some universities have open access funds to try to encourage researchers to publish open access articles. Some have open access policies that basically unilaterally declare all their research articles will be distributed by the university as open access.
This is a fight that has to occur monetarily at the university level, a lab that hasn't had a grant renewed and is having all its students TA'ing to pay their salaries doesn't have the funds to pay what is often several thousand dollars per publication[1][2] to always publish open access. A semi-productive lab could easily pay as much in publication fees for a year as they would for a graduate student.
University pays for journal subscriptions.
Lab (sometimes Department) pays to submit articles.
These are wholly different budgets. Some universities have open access funds to try to encourage researchers to publish open access articles. Some have open access policies that basically unilaterally declare all their research articles will be distributed by the university as open access.
This is a fight that has to occur monetarily at the university level, a lab that hasn't had a grant renewed and is having all its students TA'ing to pay their salaries doesn't have the funds to pay what is often several thousand dollars per publication[1][2] to always publish open access. A semi-productive lab could easily pay as much in publication fees for a year as they would for a graduate student.
[1] http://acsopenaccess.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/ACS_Sale... [2] http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/s/publication-fees