When authors from multiple universities contribute to an article, who pays for open-access fees?

Question

I am part of a postdoc research with a grant that requires publishing in open-access. An article of mine was just accepted for publication within a journal after some major revision. Given that the required revision is outside my expertise, I asked a colleague from an other university to join the article as a second author. However, I don't know whether there is a standard practice about paying open-access fees when authors from multiple universities are involved.

Answer 1

Frequently, when a funding agency requires open-access (OA) publications, project participants allot a certain amount of funds to pay the OA fees. And in case of joint paper, it is common, in my experience, for the main author to pay the OA fees with the allotted funds.

In case of joint papers where there aren’t already allotted funds for the OA fees, who usually pays, again in my experience, is either the main author or the author who has more funds available.

So, overall, there’s probably no standard, but just gentlemen agreements. In your case, since you’re the one who has the grant requiring OA publications, I’d pay the fees.

Answer 2

There's no hard-and-fast rule on this. If the authors all have roughly the same degree of involvement in the paper (and all of them have similar levels of grant funding available), then splitting the cost seems the fairest way. I've done this before, splitting the bill three ways and the publishers seemed perfectly happy to send out several invoices.

However, in the situation you describe – where the paper was originally yours alone, and you asked a colleague to join as a co-author to help with revisions – the situation is less symmetric. It sounds as if your colleague joined the project partly or wholly as a personal favour to you, and in that case, it doesn't seem entirely fair to expect them to contribute to the cost. So (from what you've written) I'd say that in this particular case you should be the one paying the fees. (If your research grant explicitly requires OA publishing, then there should presumably be some funding set aside in the grant budget to pay this.)