It's certainly moving away from this. Anyway, here's the short of it (this is not a justification of the approach, merely an explanation): 1. Researchers are

It's certainly moving away from this. Anyway, here's the short of it (this is not a justification of the approach, merely an explanation): 1. Researchers are supposed to be judged by their ability to deliver high quality research. 2. A current way of measuring this is a modified form of how many papers they publish. The modification is to look at how many times a paper is cited, but this takes a long time to see. To speed this up, you can use an average measure from other papers in the same journal. This is called the "impact factor". 3. Therefore, people want to publish their research in journals with high impact factors instead of hosting them somewhere for free. Journals act, essentially, as a badge of quality. Journals do actually spend money on the publishing process [0] (disagreements around the actual cost side, I think we can at least agree that there is a non-zero cost). They need to therefore recoup this from someone. Making things simply openly available means you can't charge the end user, so the alternative is to charge the researchers. Unless your grant has money for paying these fees, or you can apply for money from someone, the choice is either pay for it personally or let the publishers recoup the costs. edit - I forgot to add a key reason this is changing. Grant funders are now largely requiring people to make their research open, and giving them the money in the grant in order to actually do this. [0] http://www.nature.com/news/open-access-the-true-cost-of-science-publishing-1.12676 http://www.nature.com/news/open-access-the-true-cost-of-scie...