• Question: Does it cost money to publish your findings? If so, how do you feel about this?

    Asked by anon-253607 on 22 May 2020.
    • Photo: Charlotte Walker

      Charlotte Walker answered on 22 May 2020:

      Hi Georgina,

      Yes it does! Findings from research are published in scientific journals. These journal are run by publishers. The publishers charge the researchers a fee to publish their work whether it is printed or simply published online. There are two different fee categories, you can pay a higher fee so that your findings are freely available to anyone who wants to read them, this is called open access publishing. Or, you can pay a smaller fee, but then in order to view the paper about your findings, a reader has to have a subscription. For subscription they have to pay a fee.

      My feelings are mixed. I appreciate there are lots of cost associated with running a scientific journal. There are printing costs, editing costs, staff costs and running an office costs money! It shouldn’t be free.

      However, I believe we do research for the public (it is often funded by tax payer’s money) and they should have access to the findings. In order for you to read a paper I have published for free, I should publish open access and that can cost me between $1000 and $5000!!!! Which is a huge amount of money! I feel this limits the ability of scientists to publish open access and therefore their findings are not always as freely available as they would like.

    • Photo: Constance Schere

      Constance Schere answered on 22 May 2020:

      Ah this is a sensitive subject (kidding)! It does cost money to publish our findings, and contrary to popular belief, we the authors don’t get paid. Usually, scientists funded by a research council or other institution and they are responsible for some of the cost of your publication. The rest is paid for by your university/employer, who often have a subscription with various publishers like Elsevier, Taylor & Francis, etc. which gives them a discount for papers to be published.

      It sounds like just anyone can pay to get published but this is not the case for respected publications. Once you have written a paper, you submit it for peer review. It is then returned to you with one of 3 responses: Accepted unconditionally (VERY RARE), accepted with corrections (which means you need to fix your paper and resubmit), or rejected. Once the paper is accepted, the entire payment process starts. Some institutions will only pay to publish your paper if it is open access (meaning it’s free for anyone to read — in my opinion, this is the point of publishing research, to make it available to all!). Other institutions will let you publish without open access (meaning you the reader need to pay to read and it is the publisher who gets paid, not the authors!).

      I personally think that scientific research needs to be made available to all, but I understand that publishers also need to make money because without them, it’s harder to get your research out to a wider audience. It’s a business!

    • Photo: Helen Roy

      Helen Roy answered on 23 May 2020:

      There is so much discussion on this at the moment within the scientific community because there is a move to make more papers available for everyone to read – so called Open Access. In the past the publishers would have funded their work by people (organisations or individuals) paying to buy the journals just as you would buy a magazine in a newsagents. However, as scientific journals have moved online it is easier to make everything available to everyone so increasingly we are encouraged to make our data and papers Open Access. This is great because more people will have access to this information – not just those who can afford access – but someone has to pay and that’s increasingly the authors. It is expensive and I have concerns for those scientists who don’t have money in their research grants or institutes to pay. There are schemes within some journals that waiver some or all of the costs for those that can’t afford to pay. This is a fast moving topic and I think lots will change within the coming years – both in terms of online innovations and the way in which publishing is funded.

    • Photo: Rehemat Bhatia

      Rehemat Bhatia answered on 24 May 2020: last edited 23 May 2020 11:35 pm

      Hi!
      Great question!

      As Charlotte, Constance and Helen have explained – yes there is a cost to publish, and to access most scientific papers which explain and highlight scientists’ research 🙁 I also know scientists who are not sent PDFs of their publications by publishers and thus have to pay to access their own articles, which is super strange! Some journals also make you pay less per page if you write an article using a program called LaTeX rather than Microsoft Word.

      If a researcher is funded by a research council, they have to publish open access as a condition of their funding. Universities also sometimes have subscriptions to publishers, so the costs will be discounted.

      Some journals are also able to waive costs in exceptional circumstances for researchers e.g. a PhD student who has finished their PhD but still has papers to publish.

      Some newer journals, like those published by the European Geosciences Union (through Copernicus), are fully open access – and sometimes even the peer review comments are openly available too – and the fees are not higher – I think more journals should be like this so that research is available to all 🙂

    • Photo: Jamie Purkis

      Jamie Purkis answered on 24 May 2020:

      Hey there GeorginaR, great question! A big part of what many scientists do, especially those in research like myself, is talking to all different sorts of people, including the public, to talk our results.

      Take the current coronavirus pandemic. There are many scientists all over researching the virus, and they will be generating lots of interesting results. Many of these results will be very useful right now to helping us fight the virus, and these will be published in scientific journals like Science, Nature, the British Medical Journal, and so on, which you often hear about in the news. The scientists behind those results usually have to pay to publish findings in these journals, and this can be very expensive, meaning that universities usually subscribe to these journals (think of it like a giant Netflix subscription – except instead of films, universities pay to access scientific results).

      Sometimes, though, a scientific journal isn’t the best place to publish findings.
      As I said just a second ago scientists often talk to the public and other interested people, at meetings, conferences, lectures and talks. Some of these are free (like, for example, having a guest speaker in a school science lesson or a documentaries on TV, like the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures), and other times conferences can charge admission fees to attend, although these are normally (but not always!) cheaper than publishing in scientific journals.

      How do I feel about it costing money to publish findings? That’s a tricky one.
      I think it depends on who’s funding the research, as whoever is paying for it should be able to receive the benefits of it. For me, my research is funded by the public (through taxes), and so I think that as everyone is paying for my work, everyone should be able to read about my work too.

      In recent years many journals have started something called “open access publishing”, which is basically where people can look at results in journals for free, making it available for everyone. Although this is more expensive for scientific journals and scientists to publish I think this is the future; the more people that can have access to results, the more likely they are to be useful!

      When I’m publishing results in a journal I tend to select “open access”, even though this is more expensive, as I think everyone should have the option to read my results if they want.

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