Paying to publish? What??

[allegretto]

Apologies for the totally naive question but I am out of the loop. I completed my PhD last year but didn't publish anything. I now want to submit a couple of articles to journals but didn't realise that you have to pay to do this! Is this true across the board? How on earth do people afford it?

It’s not the case at all. A reputable journal will always have both a “gold open access”, where your funding body pays for immediate free access to the paper, but equally offer standard access, which is free for you as author, but cost goes to the reader or their library. To complicate matters further there is “green open access”, which is like above, but the author is permitted to deposit an author’s version of the accepted manuscript on their university repository.

Just to confuse matters further, there are entirely reputable new fully open access journals starting up to avoid the madness of academics effectively donating their labour, then having to pay to read their peers’ work, not to mention reviewing and editing for free.

I’d recommend you get advice from your own university open access team as well as from your supervisor (especially to assess the quality of a journal).

It's very field-specific.

In my field, nobody pays to submit, though you might pay an open-access fee when it's accepted (sometimes paid by funder).

Some of my colleagues work in fields where the biggest, most prestigious journals have a submission fee. At last one of them boycotts these journals in principle and it doesn't seem to have damaged career progression much.

I would be very surprised if there was a field where every single decent journal had a submission fee. Can't your (former) supervisor advise?

Ah, just realised I thought you meant submission fee whereas you might have meant publication fee.

Definitely seek advice irl as there are a lot of plausible-sounding predatory journals out there that will take money from unwary academics.

Yes, sorry I wasn't very clear. I think I was looking at Gold Open Access only and the fees frightened me off!