Eco-Evo Evo-Eco: I spent WHAT?

"I promised you a closing story, so here it is. When I was a graduate student some friends and I got together to discuss some papers we read together, and it turned into a reading group and a Synthesis paper (Bolnick et al 2003, American Naturalist). It was an all-student group of authors, self-organized, with no funding. When we finally got it accepted (after 2 revisions, at least), we reckoned with the cost of publication. It had become a really long paper with extensive tables. I was an ASN member, which got me 10 (?) free pages, but the article was way longer. Page charges for those excess pages rang up something like $1500. And not one of us had the funds to spare. It almost stopped there, but Michael Turelli offered to pay the APCs. None of us were Turelli students. He's just that kind of generous*. We accepted his offer, the paper was published, and it became my most cited article by a long shot. So, I am very sensitive to the barriers that APCs impose on unfunded authors. This is why I am such a proponent of mixed publishing models (like The American Naturalist uses), where people can opt in to pay for Open Access, or can pay less for regular page charges, or can get waivers if they are members ($20 for students!) who lack funds for APCs. That's a powerfully flexible model. But, one that is threatened by the EU's Plan S...."