no fees in closed access in organic chemistry, as far as i know. some other subfields can be different

open access can be easily two, three grands, and you better have a grant that covers this

It depends on the journal. I've only published in medical related journals, but some journals don't charge a fee if the article remains closed access. Some journals just have an embargo period, so you may be free to republish to pubmed central or something similar after a year or two. Open access of course always costs money, or more if they do charge a publishing fee. A lot of nih grants have requirements to make it open access within a year, so some publishers at least are just embargoing for a year now.

Depends. Many journals in Evolution/Ecology are still free to publish in non-OA. It's becoming rarer though because many journals are switching to full (paid!) open access.

I am currently trying to publish in the European Journal of Psychology (EJoP), which is Open Access only. The fee is 750€, if I'm not mistaken, and you can apply for fee reduction. I have no idea how lenient/strict they are with that, or how much effort that would be. The department is covering the costs, obviously.

My background is in theoretical biology, but I was mostly publishing in public health, physics, and computer science journals. We paid for every paper because I feel very strongly about research being made available to everyone, especially in the case of publicly funded work. I just make sure to budget for it.

I had a couple of papers in one of the PLOS journals, which afaik are fee-only pubs.

It’s been about ten years since I’ve had to worry about publishing, as o decided to sell out and join a commercial company, and they’re pretty averse to publishing. My information might be out of date.

I do think the academic publishing industry is atrocious, however, and I have always encouraged people to check on sites like arxiv, the personal web page of the lead author, and as a final attempt contacting the lead author directly. Most journals that I dealt with permit authors to upload preprints to sites like arxiv, and if you do it with your final revision the only difference would be the formatting. Of course, that doesn’t count as a publication for academic purposes, and it doesn’t get around paying fees for the journals that charge them, but it is an avenue for people to make their research more globally available for free. I’m sure you know of that, I’m just mentioning it for students looking for a copy of a paper.

Yes but then who is fact checking it and giving it a stamp of authenticity

Of course you can put it anywhere you’d like. Services like arXiv specialize in hosting pre-prints of published papers as well as white papers that only have an institutional association.

The problem is that the job of an academic is to publish. That’s how you build credibility and seniority. For it to count as a “published paper” it needs to have undergone peer review so that the people who want to read/cite the paper at least have the confidence that it’s at least been reviewed by other experts in the field.

There are some “journals” that will publish anything as long as they get their fees. Most academics are wise to that by now, but it can still impress people in business for whom a pub is a pub.