A brief, early morning, rant. I’m all for open access, but this morning – and most certainly not for the first time – I received an unsolicited and entirely unwanted email inviting me to submit a paper to an open access journal. The editor asked me to write in an area I know nothing about, and informed me that if my manuscript is accepted for publication I shall have to pay an author processing charge (APC). I did the only thing possible in the circumstances, which was to delete the email.
I don’t mind a bit of academic spam, but I despair at the poor targeting and am a little affronted at the invitation being so baldly attached to a fee. I still don’t get why APCs are (often, but admittedly not always) as high as they are. Had I bitten at this morning’s ‘opportunity’, having done all the hard graft I would have needed to part with around £950 (so my online currency converter tells me). Where’s that going, then? Not to the peer reviewers, who like authors are not paid directly for their efforts.
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