Cultivating money.
The journal Agrociencia, published by the Colegio de Postgraduados in Mexico, demands that submitting authors subscribe to the journal before their submissions will be considered for peer-review. A subscription costs $160, and there are additional fees once the paper is accepted.
These hidden fees, resembling a type of mordida, are not mentioned in the author guidelines. The text below is copied from an email sent by Agrociencia in response to a prospective author’s inquiry:
Time for publication: 8-10 months, depending upon writing in fluent English and scientific value of the manuscript.
Articles are published only in English and Spanish.
After an official reception letter is issued and in order to start the peer-review process, the corresponding author must pay a one-time annual subscription to Agrociencia (US$ 160.00); this payment does not imply that the manuscript will be published.
If the manuscript is approved for publication, the corresponding author must pay the translation (US$ 200-300) from English into Spanish, directly to a translator assigned by Agrociencia.
The journal’s website states that subscriptions cost $150, not $160. Also, the journal is open-access, so subscriptions are not needed to access the published content.
Colegio de cobros ocultos.
As indicated, the journal also requires submitting authors to fund a translation of the article, an additional $200-$300 cost.
The journal is also called Revista Agrociencia. The mandatory subscription and translation charges are non-standard in scholarly publishing and perhaps unethical. The journal needs to be more transparent about the fees it imposes on its authors.
Researchers in the agricultural sciences submitting papers to this journal will be taking a risk; there may be additional charges beyond those mentioned here. For authors considering submitting here, I recommend finding a better journal.
The journal has an impact factor of 0.049 according to Thomson Reuters’ Journal Citation Reports.
Hat tip: Dr. Jaime Teixeira da Silva
