[coolradmab]

yes its hard, as somone who built a wetlab in a maker space for bio materials research and did the hours each day it took to push the bleeding edge on synthetic sea shell analogues to producing a working protocol. i haven't managed to publish the work in a journal due too the fees involved. you can find more on my site https://alexmakes.net/projects/sea_chells.html

[musicale]

I don't like it when (predatory?) journals and conferences charge fees for submission or publication; is that common in your field?

A very bad trend with (IEEE, ACM, etc.) in some conferences and journals has been to charge "open access fees." I prefer publication venues that are open access without fees. However, if you get stuck with one of these bad venues you can usually still publish preprints via your own web site.