Publishing in Paid Journals

[daronloo]

I just noticed that two Q1 journals started charging a publication fee (if articles are accepted) of about 500 USD as of 1 June 2016. Is this an anticipated change for academia in our field, especially since language education has become a source of income? (e.g. I had to take TOEFL twice because I'm not from a country where English is spoken as a primary/official language). In the broader picture, maintaining an academic journal is tedious and stressful as the whole publication process of a journal requires a lot of man-power from a (depleting) pool of experts. Perhaps journals do need to start charging a fee to compensate reviewers' and editors' time and effort.

Would this be a trend for other journals as well? How would this affect us who need to publish in order to graduate and become more academically rounded?

[Richard]

Journals have one of two options for making money: charging people to read articles or charging people to publish articles. The traditional model, still the dominant model in our field, is to charge for access to articles. Especially within science, this model is changing. Several years ago there was a major backlash against publishers like Elsevier for charging excessive amounts for access, and the open-access movement started. In science some of the largest most influential journals are pay-to-publish open access, such as PLOS One (charging $1,500 to publish and publishing 30,000 articles a year - you do the maths on that one). In our field several Springer journals are now pay-to-publish open access, while a few journals are free open access (e.g. LL&T) which means they need substantial financial support from somewhere or are a labour of love (e.g. CALL-EJ). Problematically, scam journals use the pay-to-publish open-access model, and distinguishing between these and genuine journals can be difficult.

While I have some sympathy with the goals of the open-access movement, there are two major drawbacks with it. First, as Daron seems to imply, how can impoverished students, or even SoLA, afford to pay the costs of publishing if this becomes the norm? In science, nearly all publications come from funded projects and publication costs are usually included in the funding proposal; in our field, a lot of work doesn't require funding, so this source isn't available. Second, given that publishing a paper results in income, it seems likely to me that the reviewing process will be less rigorous and so the quality of papers published less guaranteed as journals want to ensure they make money.

[Woravut]

I was searching for something and found some other things that could be interesting to someone.

Future of Scholarly Publishing and Scholarly Communication: Report of the Expert Group to the European Commission

https://www.eosc-portal.eu/sites/defaul ... NN.en_.pdf