From: Jan Velterop <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Wed, 30 Sep 2015 09:04:46 +0100

Not charging application fees (submission fees) may seem odd indeed,
but it has arguably been one of the defining factors that made the
rise of commercial scientific publishing so successful after the
second world war. Until the late 50’s, journal publishing was mainly
in the hands of scholarly societies, and more often than not, they
levied page charges. Commercial publishers, in an effort to compete,
decided not to levy such charges, and quite quickly managed to attract
authors who didn’t want to – or could not – pay for page charges,
which were quite steep at the time.

And since a journal’s success is dependent on the number of articles
it can attract – and this is true for open access journals as well as
for subscription ones – any incentive for re-introducing unnecessary
hurdles is frowned upon.

You could argue that APCs are such a hurdle, and to some they are, but
at least they are only payable upon being accepted for publication.
Submission (application) fees, however, would be levied on any
submission, whether eventually rejected or accepted.

There is another reason why publishers would be most reluctant to
introduce submission fees. Such fees would put an obligation on them
to properly carry out peer review and to be prepared to defend a
decision to reject, which could simply be contested more easily if the
submitting author has paid. Not every publisher, to put it mildly,
would feel comfortable with such obligations.

Jan Velterop


> On 29 Sep 2015, at 22:04, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> From: Sandy Thatcher <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Mon, 28 Sep 2015 22:50:48 -0500
>
> Isn't it odd that, in selecting students for admission, even the
> rejected ones are expected to pay some of the costs of review of their
> applications, through application fees, whereas in journal publishing,
> the tradition has grown not to charge rejected authors for the
> processing of their submissions despite the costs involved? Why have
> these two different traditions taken root as they have in academe in
> different areas where reviews of submissions are undertaken?
>
> Sandy Thatcher