The Fallacy of Open-Access Publication

"Open access has turned out to be a misnomer. Of course, free access to research findings is good for science and society. However, open access is clearly not freely open to the scholars who are required to pay exorbitant fees to publish their results, often out of their own pockets. Graduate students who wish to publish two open-access articles a year in the journals of their choice might need to use more than a quarter of their annual income to do so, if they don’t have large grants to cover the fees. One journal that is exclusively open access required graduate students to provide copies of personal bank statements in order to be considered for a fee reduction. That same journal also has denied fee reductions to students who don’t have external funding and who earn less than $20,000 a year...."