I wonder if this is in response to Sci-Hub/Arxiv proliferation or what else.
Anyhow, I find it beyond rich -- the authors usually do all the typesetting, spell/grammar checks, formatting etc. themselves and now they get to pay for that (or their respective funding institutions). I presume that is what would land under a "processing fee". Beyond atrocious -- some journals have their custom LaTex templates only to discard formatting they put in them at the pre-publish stage.
Also, reviewers are probably still not getting paid.I'm not sure if that's an accurate sentiment, but I feel like there's an academic research winter with grants and funding are being slowly squeezed out of academia and moved to external consortia with loose academic affiliations (at least this is what I _think_ I see happening in Europe). If that's true, this trend of moving the paywall from readership to authorship is just sad.
aragilar|3 years ago