Different groups of Author Fees for published articles

Hello,

I have a question similar to #753 in the sense that I would like to advertise three different groups of article publication fees for manuscripts submitted to our journal. It will be something like

  • 300€ for printing a manuscript up to 15 pages,
  • 20€ extra for every page above the limit,
  • 100€ extra for printing in colour.

Up to now we had just the colour surcharge, but this is going to change starting 01/2016.

I understand that it means diving into OJS (or maybe PKP-lib) internals, I would just like to know if there is some work going on on #753 (so that I am not re-inventing the wheel), and, if not, where to start looking…

Thanks!

Hi @jprk,

I’m not aware of anyone working on this. Where you start will depend on how you want the user to interact with this; I think you’re proposing that the author be able to choose from a list of options not dependent on the section or any other piece of metadata, correct? Would they be choosing during the submission process, or later? And so on.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

Hi @asmecher,

you are correct that in our case the publication fees do not depend on journal section (well, mostly – we also publish Tutorials which are “invited” and therefore free of charge). For the moment, we will introduce only article publication fees, and authors will pay after layout editing, right before the publication: The problem is that we have more than one article publication fee and two of our three APCs are variable: we will charge something like 300€ + max(0,n-15)*20€ + ceil(n_color/4)*100€, where n is the number of pages – so basically the fee is determined by the layout editor after the manuscript has been typeset.

My original idea was a quick hack to introduce new payment types as defined in OJSPaymentManager.inc.php so that our authors can see the fees in the About section, and also when submitting the paper and also when looking at the submission summary page – but then telling authors the correct charge once the paper has been prepared for publication. However, this could be pretty confusing to many of them for different reasons.

So I thought that maybe there is a way to do it properly by extending OJS or writing an OJS plugin that would

  • allow for more than one submission, fast-track, and publication fees,
  • be able to assign these fees to different sections,
  • allow for manual editing of the fees (or just the total fee) so that we can have variable fees,
  • possibly allow for per-page fee or per-n-pages (4,8,16, whatever) fee.

I have quite a lot of non-OJS duties on my to-do list (and I have still to complete the selector for pre-defined message bodies from #4367) but I will probably give it a try.

Regards,
Jan

Dear Jan, good to know, that somebody else thinks about well too simple payment scheme. We, in Acta Biochimica Polonica, just charge per page of printed material plus color fee, so we also need some customization. Maybe we could somehow combine our efforts?

Pawel