Authors where paid to do the research and publish their work that produced the paper (that is what the grant was for). PLoS an Open Access publisher pays editors, type sets the work, finds a reviewer and publishes the work for free access on the internet. Reviewers are the ones that generally do not get paid for their work.

Elsevier makes over $3 billion dollars with the closed publication model. They force institutions to pay for bundles of journals they do not want. The Institutions often do not supply access to the general public despite the papers being produced with public money (and despite many of the Institutions being funded by public money).

Paying the cost upfront from the grant increases the availability to the public.

> Just friendly remember that Open access publishing is the new business model that is more lucrative for publishing industry and it is basically a tax on research activities but paid to private entities and mostly paid by taxpayer money...

While I do not disagree with this statement, this makes a significant difference for the citizens who do not happen to work in academia. Before open access, the journals would try to charge me $30-50 per article, which is ridiculous, it's a price of a textbook. Since my taxes fund public research in any case, I would prefer to be able to read the papers.

I would also love to be able to watch the talks at academic conferences, which are, to very large extent, paid by the authors, too.

We need a taxpayer funded PDF host similar to arxiv where all taxpayer funded research gets published, and if journals want to license the content to publish themselves, they pay a fee to the official platform. It'd cost a couple hundred grand a year, take ~3 people to operate full time. You could even make it self-funding by pricing publishing rights toward costs, and any overflow each year would go back to grants, or upgrades.

It should be free and open access, no registration, no user tracking, no data collection, no social features, just a simple searchable paper host that serves as official record and access. You'd need a simple payment portal for publishing rights, but fair use and linking to the official public host would allow people to link and discuss elsewhere.

It's not a hard technical problem, it's not expensive. We do things the stupid, difficult, convoluted way, because that's where bad faith actors get to pretend they're providing something of value in return for billions of dollars.

> Open access publishing is the new business model that is more lucrative for publishing industry and it is basically a tax on research activities but paid to private entities and mostly paid by taxpayer money

In addition to what @tokai said, I think it's also important to keep in mind that before Open Access the journal publishers charged subscription fees. The subscription fees were paid by universities and that was also likely largely taxpayer funded (e.g., using money from overheads charged to grants).

I have no idea what the normal process is but I have never been paid for any peer review I've ever done and none of those was for an open access publication.

Open access paradox. As an author, I hate gold open access journals. My supervisor doesn't have money (~3000 CAD nowadays) to pay for publishing. He says he would rather pay for my or other grad students' summer salary

Each time I spent hours searching an appropriate journal for my research. As time goes on, I feel like research is only for very wealthy people.

Open Access is not a business model for the publishers. They have build different ways of sucking fees out of authors when shifting to Open Access. But its FUD to claim that it's an issue with Open Access. OA is a question of licensing and copyright, nothing more. Muddling the publishers business practices with the movement to ensure free and open access to research literature is destructive and ultimately supporting the publishers, whom has been working hard for decades to dilute the concept.

but what prevents scientists (as both authors and reviewers) from banding together and creating journals that don't require money (freeing money for research budgets)?

I like the way that people add “a friendly reminder” like they’re just jogging your memory of a well known fact.

Publishers have been fighting OA for an incredibly long time. They are not foisting this on people because it’s a new great scheme they’ve come up with, they have been pushed to do it.