We were gonna submit something to Nature Communications, but then we found out they were charging $6290 for publication. For that amount of money, we could afford 37% of an invitation to a conference featuring Grover Norquist, Gray Davis, and a rabbi, or 1/160th of the naming rights for a sleep center at the University of California, or 4735 Jamaican beef patties. – Beragampengetahuan

My colleague and I wrote a paper, and someone suggested we submit it to the journal Nature Communications. Sounds fine, right? But then we noticed this:

Hey! We wrote the damn article, right? They should be paying us to publish it, not the other way around. Ok, processing fees yeah yeah, but $6290??? How much labor could it possibly take to publish one article? This makes no damn sense at all. I guess part of that $6290 goes to paying for that stupid website where they try to con you into paying several thousand dollars to put an article on their website that you can put on Arxiv for free.

Ok, then the question arises: What else could we get for that $6290? A trawl through the blog archive gives some possibilities:

– 37% of an invitation to a conference featuring Grover Norquist, Gray Davis, and a rabbi

– 1/160th of the naming rights for a sleep center at the University of California

– 4735 Jamaican beef patties

I guess that, among all these options, the Nature Communications publication would do the least damage to my heart. Still, I couldn’t quite bring myself to commit to forking over $6290. So we’re sending the paper elsewhere.

At this point I’m still torn between the other three options. 4735 Jamaican beef patties sounds good, but 1/160th of a sleep center named just for me, that would be pretty cool. And 37% of a chance to meet Grover Norquist, Gray Davis, and a rabbi . . . that’s gotta be the most fun since Henry Kissinger’s 100th birthday party. (Unfortunately I was out of town for that one, but I made good use of my invite: I forwarded it to Kissinger superfan Cass Sunstein, and it seems he had a good time, so nothing was wasted.) So don’t worry, that $6290 will go to a good cause, one way or another.