Publishing costs money too

A student finishes a project, writes it up, submits it, and gets through peer review. Then the journal sends an invoice.

Many open access journals charge authors an article processing charge. The reader pays nothing, so the author pays. Across six large publishers the median listed fee for a fully open access journal is about $2,000. Authors paid those six publishers an estimated $8.3 billion from 2019 to 2023, and the annual total nearly tripled in that time.¹

A professor pays the fee from a grant. A student has no grant. A review of twenty years of research on these fees names two concerns with the model, and the first is that authors without funding cannot publish.²

How to avoid the fee

• Ask for a waiver. Many journals cut or waive fees for authors without funding. Ask before you submit.
• Pick a journal that charges nothing. The Directory of Open Access Journals lets you filter for journals without fees.
• Post a preprint. Servers such as bioRxiv and medRxiv are free, and a preprint makes the work public while the paper is under review.
• Ask the lab. If the work came out of a funded lab, the lab's grant may cover the fee.

When none of that works

We pay it. Journal fees are one of the largest things we spend on after housing, because a paper that never appears helps nobody. See publication fees.

Sources

1. Haustein S, et al. Estimating global article processing charges paid to six publishers for open access between 2019 and 2023. arXiv:2407.16551, 2024. arxiv.org
2. Borrego A. Article processing charges for open access journal publishing: a review. Learned Publishing. 2023;36(3):359-378. doi.org

Sources checked September 21, 2026. See every source we cite.