Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 37, No. 183.
        Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
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        Date: 2023-08-31 13:31:41+00:00
        From: John Wall <jnwall@ncsu.edu>
        Subject: Pay for Publication

Willard,

I'm curious to learn if paying money for scholarly publication in the
(digital) humanities is a phenomenon that others have experienced. Is it
customary and I am simply not familiar with it? Is the need to publish
becoming so critical that people are willing to pay for it? To pay what
looks like lots of money for it?

I've received a long and entailed email from someone associated with
something called MDPI announcing a

*"Special Issue entitled "Big Data Visualization and Virtual Reality", to
be published in the journal Information (ISSN 2078-2489, IF 3.1).  Based on
your expertise in this field, we think you could make an excellent
contribution. We welcome researchers, data scientists, designers, and
industrial professionals to submit their original research and review
articles that address open questions, provide insightful experiments,
evaluations, and case studies, present an advance in performance and
interaction modality design, or provide insights and guidelines towards
future design and challenges. For further reading, please follow the link
to the Special Issue Website
at: https://www.mdpi.com/si/information/P1200T1SVV
<https://www.mdpi.com/si/information/P1200T1SVV>" *

All well and good -- except when I got further into the email
I discovered that if they accepted the essay I must pay them over $1800.00.
Or as they put it, *"An Article Processing Charge (APC) of 1600 CHF
currently applies to all papers accepted after peer review." *

This feels like someone here is going to make a tidy profit out of this
issue. I've published a good number of essays in my time, but I've never
been asked to buy my way into print before. I'm not at all interested in
starting now, and I have advised these folks of my concern. It feels like a
form of bribery to me.

Others' thoughts?

JNW

--
The Rev Dr John N. Wall, FRHistS
Professor Emeritus of English Literature
North Carolina State University
Principal Investigator for
The Virtual John Donne Project
https://virtualdonne.chass.ncsu.edu/
Including
The Virtual St Paul's Cathedral Project
https://vpcathedral.chass.ncsu.edu/
The Virtual Paul's Cross Project
https://vpcross.chass.ncsu.edu/
The Virtual Trinity Chapel Project
https://vtcp.chass.ncsu.edu/


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