When Alicia Kowaltowski was looking to publish new results about pancreatic cells earlier this year, she wanted a journal with an international audience and a strong reputation. The biochemist at the University of São Paulo was looking out for her student co-authors, who need to publish in prominent journals to help their chances of landing postdoctoral appointments abroad—a goal for many researchers working in developing countries. She picked the open-access (OA) journal Molecular Metabolism, produced by Elsevier, the world’s largest publisher of scientific papers.

Kowaltowski knew that, like other OA journals, it charges authors a fee, which makes the paper free to read when published. But she expected to obtain a discount, as she had in the past, because she works in a less affluent country. Instead, after the paper was accepted, the journal asked for its standard fee of $3810. She refused; her government grant that funded the work caps the amount that can be put toward such fees at the equivalent of about $2100, a reflection of Brazil’s modest research budgets. “If you end up paying, then you’re losing funds for other things, like laboratory chemicals,” says Kowaltowski, who this year received a L’Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science International Award for her research. And she wasn’t eager to tap her monthly paycheck of about $3500 after taxes.

Kowaltowski and a co-author emailed the journal 12 times asking for a discount. It eventually published the paper, but Elsevier threatened Kowaltowski with legal action if she didn’t pay the quoted fee. As of last week, the matter was unresolved. Getting discounts is “kind of a battle every time,” she says. (Elsevier says it determines fee reductions on a case-by-case basis.)

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