How does paying to submit to a PubMed indexed journal work?

[agiraffe999]

Hi everyone. I was looking online to submit a paper to various well known pub med indexed journals in the specialty of my choice, and I was wondering who typically pays the submission fee. It seems like a couple hundred dollars if not thousand + dollars that I’d need to pay if it gets accepted. And this is for high quality journals as well, not the predatory ones. Does the PI have a budget from the institution or hospital they work at that covers this? I want to ask my PI but I know this may seem a bit too naive. Thanks in advance.

---

Members don't see this ad.

 

[sunshinefl]

I think you/PI/someone that isn’t the journal has to pay if they want to make the article open access

 

[Pinocytosis]

There are generally three options:
1) The department has a research fund from the institution
2) The department has a research fund that comes from a collective pool of attendings' salaries
3) The attending himself/herself will pay the publication fee

As a medical student (and future resident), I would highly recommend to always make sure that you have an attending on there willing to pay (whether through the fund or out of their own pocket). Students are often not seen as employees, especially in the department, so this makes using those funds sometimes difficult. Another thing I have done (depending on the department) is send the invoice (bill) to the department. This usually gets routed to the administration, such as the residency program coordinator, who will know what to do with it.

 

[aldol16]

High-quality journals generally don't require exorbitant fees to publish. You're referring to journals that are seen more as predatory and likely open-access. You might recognize the name of a well-known journal in their titles but the open-access version is not the same tier. Something like JAMA versus JAMA Open.

So if you think your research is high-quality, you should try submitting it to reputable journals in your field that aren't open access.

 

[sloop]

My experience thus far has been that most reputable journals do not charge publication fees unless you want the article to be open-access. When I have submitted, I have always just chosen the basic option which doesn’t have a fee associated with it. My understanding is that this allows the journal to charge fees for people to read the article if they don’t have personal or institutional access to a subscription.

Although I may have some broad philosophical preference for my work to be freely available, I don’t personally care too much whether the journal puts it behind a paywall as long as I’m able to cite it in my CV.