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Your basic assessment is correct, however, you're forgetting a key detail. Every journal I know of also charges the author a fee to submit papers. So the author
by eyegor 7y ago
Your basic assessment is correct, however, you're forgetting a key detail. Every journal I know of also charges the author a fee to submit papers. So the author pays to submit their work, volunteers review it, the author does corrections, and then it might get published behind a pay wall. For any university research, the work itself is paid for mostly via government and private company grants.
- Blaisorblade0 7y agoThat sounds weird; all journals I know are paid either by readers or by the submitter (the latter is called gold open access).
- ajford 7y agoThe journals I'm familiar with require both. The reader pays for access (or more commonly their university/research org/public library/employer pays for it), and often is only available in bundles, such as multiple unrelated journals or forcing a library to maintain print and digital access even if they only want digital access. The submitter is usually required to pay a submission fee to cover/subsidize the cost of review. Some do allow you to pay a surcharge for open access, and in many cases (at least the grants I was working on) grants and funding cannot be used for these costs. I am overjoyed to see that it's becoming more common to have fully open access journals, or that the open access fee is reduced. And the endorsement of more open access journals for fields that have historically had a dominant closed access journal (such as the American Astronomical Society and it's introduction of new journals like the Planetary Science Journal).