In reputable open-access journals, you can have the fees waived if you don't have grant or institutional funding that's earmarked to pay for publication/dissemination of research. What usually happens is that universities take at least some of the budgets they previously used to buy journal subscriptions, and put them towards publication fees instead. NIH and NSF and those kinds of grants will also pay publication fees (along perhaps with other ways of disseminating research). If you have access to neither, then you don't pay. Here's is the policy from PLoS, for example: https://www.plos.org/publications/publication-fees/plos-publ...

In CS there are typically no fees to begin with, at least in the areas I work in (JMLR and JAIR are no-fee open-access journals). Instead journals are run basically without staff, authors format their own documents in LaTeX, and an institution (in the case of JMLR, MIT) donates some server space and maybe the time of a student assistant. The main downside to this is that publication quality control tends to be a bit worse, as there's no copyediting or layout type of service (JMLR has quite a few surprisingly badly edited papers, despite being a generally good journal). But it is usually "good enough".

Put more favourably, the purpose of an open access journal is to arrange a critical evaluation of my stuff and to point other researchers to it (curation). To justify paying for this, I think of it like hiring a consultancy and, later, a marketing firm for my research.

Perhaps in a better world, we would disentangle the review and the curation aspects -- I'd pay for the arrangement of peer review of my article, upload it freely to the arxive, and pay separately for unbiased, curated lists of noteworthy articles in my field.

There is nothing crazy about it. Most research is funded by tax money and researchers have a moral and in some countries legal obligation to make their results accessible to the public. The traditional publishing model failed to achieve this. Open access journals are a simple and clean solution.

You say "It used to be that the reader was the customer" but you don't explain why it should be this way.

Because the customer defines the role of the journal.

"If you're not paying, you're the product" is endlessly repeated on the internet. I think it applies to academic journals as well.

But the financier of the research is already paying for the research to be done, rarely for their economic interest, but so that it gets out there, establishes the science, furthers knowledge, cements reputations, etc. For research done by economic interests the incentive is even stronger, a drug company, say, wants to get their drug out, proven, marketed.

Your response seems high on derision, but you've not actually made any point about why it shouldn't be the people paying for the research's role to pay for the research's availability.

The counter arguments is on availability, the hegemony of large institutions, and the lack of transparency of funding bodies.

So, other than derision, accusations of naked emperors, and a variation of "didn't used to be like that", what actually is your problem with that model?

  > So, other than derision, accusations of naked emperors, and a variation of "didn't used to be like that", what actually is your problem with that model?

The fact that the interest of the journal is now naturally aligned with that of the writer, instead of with that of the reader. This makes it very useful for the writer, which pays[0], publishes and so gets to live another year having his grant renewed; it also makes it quite useless for the reader, which cannot count on a seriously curated publication.

[0] "Pays" meaning "diverts part of his funding allowance"

I don't know if that's true. "Readers" currently means "research libraries", who act on behalf of the scientists doing the research, so shift isn't so great.

Additionally, open access journals still must maintain an image of prestige and quality -- authors want to publish in the most prestigious possible journal. There is incentive for journals to compete on quality even when paid by authors.

In any case, I think the role of journals as gatekeepers for quality is overstated (peer reviewers and editors generally do a bad job assessing article quality), and as science shifts to alternative forms of peer review and publication, journals will matter less.

> The fact that the interest of the journal is now naturally aligned with that of the writer, instead of with that of the reader.

Thank you. Good observation. I didn't get that from your original comment.

It makes much more sense to pay once for publishing a paper than continuously paying for it forever, doesn't matter by who. Searching for a 50+ years old paper and bumping into a paywall is really frustrating. What justifies these journals to make a profit from these papers forever?

Aren't universities the main customer of journals already? They pay millions for subscriptions.