(Most journals charge somewhere between a hundred and a thousand dollars per page to "defray printing charges", and each journal article will therefore be labelled somewhere in really tiny letters as being an "advertisement".)
This is the "free access" model of scientific publishing -- no subscription fees, but authors pay for publication (and in some cases it is taxpayers subsidizing publication, because people who get grants for their work can add the cost of publishing to the grant proposal). Some of the really major journals (like Nature) may use the same model, but usually the author's institution pays the publishing costs. Some journals, like the Journal of Medical Internet Research, will subsidize authors who haven't got the cash to pay for their own publication.
The prohibition on providing "services" to authors in certain parts of the world seems to me a way of making intellectual ghettoes. The topic came up a few months back on an editors' listserv to which we subscribe and sounded like a crazy rumor. Then, about a week later, an ms from an Iranian author arrived in the mail. It has been sitting on my desk for several weeks now because my editor in chief isn't sure how to handle it. We are contractors to a major medical publisher and I make $12 an hour. Do we want to risk fines or imprisonment to give this author, who almost certainly speaks English as a second language and will need copyediting among other "services," a publication venue?
If we reject the manuscript on that basis, the work may not be published at all, no matter how good it is, due to the small, specialized focus of the journal to which it was submitted. Since getting a manuscript to peer reviewers and refining the work for publication is a way for researchers to make connections, denying this kind of opportunity is tantamount to blocking scientific development.
Frankly, this just plain sucks. And there are plenty of other editors in our shoes (ie, an academic journal with "editorial staff" of one or two people and volunteer peer reviewers).
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2005 | 1 |
| 2004 | 1 |
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