author-doesn't-pay OA

Bill Hoooker has taken a limited vow of silence on his blog but some things make him break it. One is dis/misinformation about OA… If it won’t sink in, maybe we can pound it in…

Another brief un-hiatus, this one sparked by a question asked by Dave Munger at BPR3:

If you know of a peer-reviewed, open-access journal that does not charge a publication fee, let us know about it in the comments.

Practically every time I talk about OA, online or in meatspace, I hear “I’d like to support OA but I can’t afford it, don’t all those journals charge, like, $2500 per article?”No. They don’t.
Everyone seems to be thinking of PLoS, never mind that they waive their fees at the drop of a hat; the assumption that most OA journals charge (high) author-side fees is both widespread and completely wrong.
In fact, more than 2/3 of the journals listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and more than 80% of OA journals published by scholarly societies charge no author-side fees at all; in contrast, more than 75% of the 247 non-DOAJ journals in a 2005 survey do charge author-side fees (page charges, colour charges, reprint charges, etc) in addition to subscription charges.
… and a lot of carefully argued material showing that OA does not cost most authors.

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