Well, I am sure there is a scam, because there’s money involved and it’s happening in this day and age, but talking is free, listening is free, yet the phone company makes both sides pay so they can talk and listen, and I wouldn’t consider that a scam.
It’s about the margins. If your phone contract was “100€/minute” that would be a scam. Also journals do have a lot more power than phone companies. Journals aren’t a network of providers where you can choose whichever is cheapest.
Like I said I was expecting some sort of borderline legal scam. It’s just that the meme only mentions that you have to pay them which in itself is not a scam.
The meme leaves out the very important detail that most of the researchers working “for free” in the first panel are definitely getting paid, and usually by public funding (public universities and/or grants from taxpayer-funded institutions like NIH, NSF, etc.). That’s a big part of what makes it a scam.
