A first experience with Open Access publishing

"Without the waiver mentioned above, I'd have had to pay 500 USD for my manuscript classified as an "opinion article". Regular research articles are twice as much. Compared to a theoretician's budget, which needs to cover mostly travel, these amounts are important. Moreover, in France's heavily bureaucratized public research, every euro comes with strings attached that define when, where, and on what you are allowed to spend it. Project-specific research grants often do allow to pay publication costs, but research outside of such projects, which is still common in the theoretical sciences, doesn't have any specific budget to turn to. The idea of the Open Access movement is to re-orient the money currently spent on subscriptions towards paying publishing costs directly, but such decisions are made on a political and administrational level very remote from my daily work. Until they happen, it is rather unlikely that I will publish in Open Access mode again."