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While this is true on its face, any OA publisher worth their salt offers a fee waiver program, and the expection from Day 1 of OA has been that these costs shou

While this is true on its face, any OA publisher worth their salt offers a fee waiver program, and the expection from Day 1 of OA has been that these costs should be baked into grant applications and funding requests. Many funding bodies and institutions take care of this for you, having OA funds and assistance to take care of OA fees and to help direct publishing scientists to non-predatory publishers (Elsevier in particular can charge obscene OA fees)and also pick up the tab. As such, it is very unusual for a Submitting author to have to pay an OA charge. COI statement: I used to work for an OA-only publisher, but have not been employed there for the last 2 years.

kurthr 10y ago
The ones who offered fee waiver programs weren't on his list, because they weren't predatory. For example, PNAS may not be a great journal, but it's OpenAcess and not predatory... hundreds of others with very similar names to high profile journals and fake conferences are predatory. I wouldn't say that it's rare to have to pay (even for a non-free journal)... in fact it may be more common to pay just based on the number of predatory journals and their published articles, it just isn't ethical (either for the publisher or often for the writer).