@albertcardona @elduvelle @MatteoCarandini @bc_butler

Agreed. I think we, as a field, might be able to put better resources in front of our members so as to support journals that keep fees to the minimum and are open access.

Right now there are a few "currents" flowing in the wrong direction.

First, many society journals charge publication fees, sometimes large. I have never been sure why they are what they are. Maybe it is just costs, but as was recently pointed out here, some societies profit from their journals, which doesn't seem in line with the point of societies...

Second, because almost all journals are charging publication fees, people are (probably) price insensitive, I suspect for most PIs, the difference between a $2000 and $3400 fee isn't something taken into account when deciding where to submit. Which helps the for-profit journals/publishers so long as they win on the "prestige" front.

Third, somewhat like the airline industry, for-profit publishers are always looking for ways to increase profits. Open-access, ironically, provided them a leverage point to charge larger (and sometimes crazy high) fees. Their excuse being lost revenue from open access. Which is probably mostly a fiction. I don't know how SFN justifies it, but their "article freely available as soon as it is published" fee is "a surcharge of $3,615" on top of the $1,710 member fee for publication ($2,360 for nonmembers). Wow. How do they come up with $3,615? And note that all articles will be publicly available 6 months after publication. So they are collecting $3,615 for 6 additional months of public access? Seems like a fee grab... (like charging to be able to pick your same economy seats early when buying a plane ticket...)

Things we might do:

1. If one is a member of a given society, it might be good to ask why the fees are what they are. And push to make them basically at cost.

2. Consider doing what the neuroimage board did. Along with MIT press, I think there are other on-line platforms that support low-cost journals (my university does so, I think at no cost: https://lps.library.cmu.edu/site/about/). If an editorial board from a respected journal moves en masse to a low-fee or free platform, I think the submissions move with it.

3. Would be nice to compile a list of publication fees at relevant journals and keep that on-line and accessible. Plus whether there is any profit built-in to the fees or not. If this were readily accessible, authors might consider it as a factor more often in their submission decisions. And shine some light on bad vs. good actors in this space. (There is this: https://doaj.org but the search isn't great in terms of disciplinary granularity).

4. More senior people need to acknowledge and respect publications in less well-known, but lower-fee journals to support movement to such. This means if evaluating people for hiring, promotion, etc. we need to look a the content of the papers, not the place where the paper appeared. Everyone says they do this, but in practice, people often don't. They heavily weigh prestige publications and discount less well-known publications. Maybe we should inversely weight publication "value" by the publication fees!

Unfortunately, for-profit, respected journals will continue to do okay because there are essentially an infinite pool of scientists who want their work to appear in peer-reviewed journals. But we can create a better eco-system for encouraging and supporting publication in open-access, lower-fee publishing.