APCs for letters to editor
I was wondering what people's experience are with article publication charges (APCs) with correspondence to the editor.
I am a clinician researcher, and the university I am affiliated with has a read and access agreement with all major publishers. I have published original research in open access journals using this without problems.
Recently an editorial was published in a Springer journal which I disagreed with, and so I wrote a letter to the editor challenging some of the assertions. The journal itself is fully open access. The letter has been accepted for publication. However I have now been told that read and access agreements do not cover correspondence, and so they would like me to pay the full APC for publication of the letter, which is £2590.
I do not have any grants that would cover this, so it would need to come out of my own pocket. Does anyone else have any experience with this sort of thing? Charging a full APC for three non peer-reviewed paragraphs, challenging a position put forward by the same journal, seems a bit steep and potentially limits the ability of people to validly critique the output of said journal. I can understand the APC in relation to other manuscript types, but I would have thought a letter to the editor probably doesn’t put a huge financial burden on the publisher.
I suppose my options could be to either write back and request a waiver, or submit elsewhere, but it does seem a little backwards. I would be interested to hear if others have also encountered this and found ways to address it.