I think in computer science it’s normal to have to attend a conference to present your paper if it’s accepted. And they charge a higher fee to presenters than to regular attendees.
So the people providing the content that everyone shows up for get charged more, man that's a weird business model. Like running a cable network that charges channels to be on it.
I think it all comes around to how the funds are distributed.
Researcher gets grants from the federal government to enable their work. They do the work, write the paper, get it accepted to a conference. They're required to attend and present to get it published. So they have an excuse to buy flights, hotels, expense food all on government dime. And the conference is put on, in part, by other researchers, who aren't going to use their own funds to put on the event. So they charge people to attend, and those who want to get published have the largest incentive to attend, so they can be charged the most.
I only did 2 years of graduate research and attended a handful of conferences (unpublished unfortunately)... I could have this wrong, but I'm pretty sure this is the way, at least in the computer science field.
High impact factor journal are among those that ask fees depending on number of pages and figures. Or at least they used to when I used to do academic research
i wonder if that keeps researchers from developing economies from becoming impactful, because $3k is like 15 months of a minimum wage in brazilian reais, and more than entire month's wages for 99.9% of our professors
edit: for the humanities this seems especially bad, it kind of makes it sure that western social thought remains dominant since only you guys can actually pay for it
Oh absolutely. It's a huge issue, especially in humanities and social sciences, where the barrier of entry makes it so that almost all published research is conducted by certain populations on themselves. Some people call it "WEIRD" populations, meaning western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (though that "weird" terminology is a bit stinky... I'm looking at the "E" and "D"). Interestingly, China has now overtaken the US in publishing the most highly cited research of any country, though I think their advances are mostly in natural sciences and engineering.
There are also issues with how we qualify good quality or *academic * research. Again, this is especially the case in social sciences and humanities where the standards have been set by colonial researchers who had the means to run expensive studies on large samples. As a result, a lot of research methodologies and ways of knowing that don't align with the western colonial standards (e.g., qualitative research, narrative analysis) get discounted or written off entirely