”Scientific Reports is an open access journal. To publish in Scientific Reports, all authors are required to pay an article-processing charge (APC) of $1,495.”
This is becoming very common in academia. The university I used to work for is beginning to require that all research is published in open access journals. Do you know the ludicrous fees universities pay to closed-access journals?
“Open access” journal fees are often accounted for by institutional affiliations or grant funding donors. The upside of upfront publication charges is that the research output isn’t paywalled and therefore ideally reaches more eyeballs and brainpans than the conventional route.
That is the upside, but there are many other high reputation peer-reviewed open journals with close to zero payment. Is the domain really worth the cost?
It is kinda messed up, when you adjust the price based on the available money of institutional affiliations or donors. It is just more profits for journal and nothing for authors, while forcing authors to pay.
For example accepted papers in HICSS are stored publicly without extra cost.
> Starting with HICSS-50, all HICSS publication will be archived and disseminated at no cost to all readers worldwide through ScholarSpace. A complete set of HICSS proceedings will also be made available in the digital library of the Association of Information Systems (AIS).
The New Journal of Physics, a respected open access physics journal, charges $2225.
https://publishingsupport.iopscience.iop.org/journals/new-jo...