Publishing an open-access paper in a journal can be prohibitively expensive. Some researchers are drumming up support for a movement to change that, reports The Atlantic.
Imagine you’ve spent the last few years writing a manuscript. You submit it to a publisher, and they make you an offer: They’ll print it, but once it’s published, they own your work. They’ll sell it to people who want to read it, but you won’t see any of the profits. Alternatively, if you pay the publisher to print your work, they’ll release it to the public for free.
These are the options for academics publishing their research in mainstream journals—but that’s begun to change over the past several years, as academics have started to push more strongly for better options. The latest effort is taking shape in the cognitive-science community, where a group of researchers are petitioning the publishing giant Elsevier to lower fees to publish open-access papers in Cognition, a well-regarded journal.
