Like a Million Pounds…
I’ve come down with some sort of lurgy and had to cancel a tutorial that was due to take place today, which I am sorry about. I did, however, manage to rise from my sick bed earlier this morning to publish a paper at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. When I checked the publishing dashboard I saw that this one is paper No. 425. This is a significant figure if you reckon by the cost of an Article Processing Charge (APC) at Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. The current APC is £2356 per paper. If you multiply this by 425 the result is just over a million pounds (£1,001,300 to be exact). The Open Journal of Astrophysics, being a Diamond Open Access journal, is totally free for authors.
I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, that this is a small fraction of the money being wasted by the astronomical community worldwide on publication charges but if even a small operation like ours can save a million pounds, just think of what could happen if we all published this way! For one thing, there would certainly be more money available for actual research. That doesn’t only go for astronomy, of course: almost every scientific discipline is being ripped off by publishers who have hijacked the Open Access movement to generate income from APCs.
I’ll repeat the quotation I posted yesterday about a scandal relating to corporate publishing giant Elsevier
The scandal exposes the windfall profits of scientific publishers, who in recent years have amassed billions of dollars in earnings from public funds earmarked for science.
It’s a shocking idea, I know, but what if we spent public funds on what they are supposed to be spent on rather than handing millions to greedy publishers?
In the Dark 
December 6, 2025 at 11:10 am
[…] Once again it’s time for the usual Saturday morning update of the week’s new papers at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. Since the last update we have published a further six papers, which brings the number in Volume 8 (2025) up to 190, and the total so far published by OJAp up to 425. I blogged about the significance of the latter figure here. […]
December 21, 2025 at 12:47 am
And authors without grants cannot publish in traditional Open Access. So, only a “proper” research is promoted, the one which has money.