Although I find the tone of your post a bit too "ranty", you address some important points. My first feeling is Academia StackExchange would be a better fit for your question, as it is a more philosophical question that affects all fields of science, not only bioinformatics.
Your post addresses several issues about modern science:
- how to fund research (in general, and more specifically, research publication)
- how to evaluate research
- how to evaluate researchers competence
I will address only 1), and briefly and in a over-simplifying way at that. As the saying goes, there is no free lunch, and publication process has to be paid somehow. There are two competing models right now (with possibly a third in the making): 1. publication is (mostly) free, access to papers is paid - this is the big publishers (Elsevier, Springer, Wiley, and so on) model; 2. publication is paid, access is free - PLoS model; and 3. publication and access are free, with a simplified publishing process - arXiv / bioRxiv models.
As science is somewhat conservative, preferred models are 1) and 2), as 3) is not peer-reviewed, nor has an impact factor, etc - probably the fact it hasn't been monetized also counts.
To get to the point, I am wondering if there are journals that accepts scientific manuscripts without a mandatory payment.
Yes, several, those following the monetary model 1) above. You will often have to read a lot of "instructions to authors" and related pages to discover if and how much are the costs to publishing at a particular journal.
Or you may go the bioRxiv (also tweet / post about your pre-prints), if you are lucky, it will pick up peoples interests and several (mostly young) researchers will consider this as a good publication.
Not a journal but maybe it helps you. https://www.biorxiv.org/
Think this is not true,
you only need publications when you want to get a Phd.No one wants to read about just ideas. People want to read about tested and proven ideas. And that cost money anyways (lab, supplies, salary etc) and you need a fund for that and that fund is also there to help you publish.
Also don't forget that the papers get peer reviewed, some person need to find reviewers the website need to stay in the air etc. that cost money.
Besides my opinions, I do agree that some costs to publish something are insane.
I have no respect for any PhD program that actually requires publications. While I published relatively well as a grad student I'm very glad my program didn't encourage taking on simple low-risk projects by making absurd publication demands.
I'd add to this that in the UK, its actually pretty unusual to get papers during the PhD as they're only about 3 years long, particularly in experimental biology. It's a bit more normal in chemistry and physics. It's certainly something academics will push for, as long as it adds to, and not distracts from, successfully completing a thesis - but it is not a requirement to graduate that you have any papers.
In Mexico, all Bio-related Ph.D. programs I'm aware demands a first author publication or patent to graduate.
First of all, thanks a lot for the response. By "any idea," I was inferred to the scientistic proof idea. My point was that the concept of publishing is kind of weird. I will give you an example, and I am sure you will get my point. Let's say I found a job opportunity. In the interview day, the interviewer will be going to tell you. "you will salary yourself, it is 12hours working daily, and to get hired, you have to pay me too". In the salary place, I put as you mentioned (lab, supplies, salary, etc.), and the interviewer is the journal. Regarding peer-reviewed people, I do agree that should consider as a cost, but don't forget that journals have subscriptions and advertisements as well.
Yep - its a very backwards system. Your analogy is not quite right, as the expectation is not that the researcher themselves pay.
It is most certainly a con that we have to pay to publish and pay to access oftentimes.
I think journals have converted themselves into brands these days, the more well-known a brand is, more you pay for publishing. The ones who don't charge money are typically not so well recognized (read : negligible impact factor). If you are okay with that then they (low impact factor journals) are more desperate than you are for publishing your content with very lenient peer review (in some cases no peer review) process, which is a red flag already.
agree, it is a nasty business nowadays. But at least many publishers do not charge (or apply a reduced rate) if the authors are from low-income or a lower-middle-income countries. For example, https://www.biomedcentral.com/getpublished/article-processing-charges or https://www.cell.com/cell-reports/authors.
Thanks for the links @ grant.hovhannisyan. The problem is that this situation not only exists in developing counties but in developed as well. @ grant.hovhannisyan, @genomax I have many examples from France, Greece, and Italy, too, even if there is funding for publishing it not enough from more than 2-3 publications annually.
Welcome to the broken world of academic publishing.
For the record, there are lots of journals that support open-access science (not that this always means you don't have to pay, just that you don't pay to access).
Typically, you're going to be looking at online journals since they aren't passing printing costs on to you. I can't think of any names right now, but I'm sure others will weigh in.
At the moment, you will probably find that these journals are lower impact factor (not that I'm endorsing chasing impact factor, but its something everyone thinks about). Hopefully this will change over time as the push for open access accelerates. I would also encourage you to look at the arXiv pre-print sites. This is a good (and free) way to disseminate early manuscripts and to get some peer review.
One last thing, I'm not sure what your institution is, but many (at least here in the UK) have a specific budget from the government to fund/subsidise the costs of publishing - it should never be out of the researchers own pocket. Some institutions may however dictate that it comes out of your own grant money.
Thank you much for the reply and the suggestion. I wish other institutes or Universities consider the costs of publications as the UK. Unfortunately some times due to budget limitations, so Uni/institutes are considering among others ( labs materials, supplies etc) paper costs a lot, and you end up to publish what the director/supervisor finds more attractive and scientific interesting. In bioinformatics, for instance, you don't need to produce data if you want to publish and you can work at any time of the day almost from everywhere. Data are online, so if you have a question to answer; you have the answer much more accessible than testing in the lab. Even in that case, you should that the "permission" from the hierarchy upper person for that. So this is why I wrote this post.
I have not checked specifically of late but many journals used to have reduced (or perhaps no fees) if you were from a developing country. If you are not then grants certainly have enough money to pay for incidentals.