There is another payoff to the practice of charging for all submissions, that authors will less likely to breakdown their articles into multiple smaller publications to add lines to their resume. However, I would suggest a lower submission fee and a larger publication fee once the article has been accepted for publication.
Several years ago, I wrote an article for the SPARC newsletter suggesting that we also build an organization to serve as an agent for research universities and publishers. Under this model, the fees for submission and publication would be pooled with this agency, and the agency would then bargain with publishers for X number of articles to be edited and published per year as an agreed upon price. The fees would be paid up-front so the publisher would have a secure financial base. Each year, the cost and number of articles could be renegotiated based on the quality of articles published and other quality and quantity factors to be established. This system would give more power to authors and their institutions whereas the current model still leaves the publishers in a very strong power position over the author. But it also offers the publisher a guaranteed revenue stream. --On Thursday, January 15, 2004 10:04 AM +0000 Fytton Rowland <j.f.rowl...@lboro.ac.uk> wrote:
The differing fees ($500 versus $1500) have to do with rejection rates, since only accepted papers pay the fee. Rejected papers incur costs. The figure of about $500 per paper being adequate to cover costs depends on a rejection rate of about 50%. A rejection rate of about 80% would require a fee of about $1500. An alternative approach would be to charge the fee to all submissions. It need only be about $250 then, but those whose papers are rejected get nothing for their $250. This method would encourage authors to be very realistic in their choice of journal to submit to, though. As far as I know no journal has tried this approach yet. Fytton Rowland, Loughboroughb University, UK.
