If the order of magnitude differential you're referring to is my rough range of costs of $500 - $5,000 per article, then there's a lot to dive into there. The r

If the order of magnitude differential you're referring to is my rough range of costs of $500 - $5,000 per article, then there's a lot to dive into there. The reason for that range is that we're talking about very different products at the ends of that spectrum. On the low end you have journals that intentionally screen only for scientific soundness and will publish anything, across all fields, that meets basic scientific rigor. And I don't intend that description to come off as sounding negative. I think there's an important role for that kind of publishing. Some of the publishers in this space are PLOS, PeerJ, and Springer Nature with Scientific Reports. As an incredibly rough rule of thumb, these types of journals accept about half of the articles that get submitted. Then on the high end you have journals focused on exclusivity and only publishing the most impactful science. So that's the Cells and Natures and Sciences of the world (and OA journals like eLife). They reject most of the submissions, and so the cost is far higher on a per published article basis because they do a lot of work to throw away most of the articles. These are very different services being offered.