Why I Can't Afford (To Publish In) Open Access Journals — The Digital Apothecary

"The open-access movement has always struck a chord with me. I personally love the idea of opening up the realm of research and publications by scientists and scholars to the public. There has been a lot of discord over the years on the monetization of scholarship, where you essentially have academics competing to submit articles (Publish or Die - I'll come back to that...), then have other scholars review said articles for free, and then publish, and readers (or more likely institutions) must subscribe in order to access said articles ... Nonetheless, I am starting to meet a barrier for some of my publishing endeavors. A number of journals are moving to the open access model, and ditching traditional publishing models. Thats great. What really stops me in the process is when I find that there is no other option to submit a manuscript for eventual publishing without paying. This just happened with a project I have been working with a few students in the past year and a colleague of mine, where a journal we have been eyeing went open access. I remember when my colleague showed me the email and was happy to see that we may be able to get something online for many to read. Unfortunately, as we looked up the authors instructions as we were finalizing our work, we saw that we would ultimately now have to pay. We have no money for this, and I do not expect departmental funds to go to such work ..."