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I have successfully got my papers accepted in different journals. However, due to some money issues, I couldn't get them published. Now I have my final project presentations.

Will it hold value for me? I have slogged day in and out to accomplish this, but money constraints have shattered everything.

How do I manage my presentation in such a scenario?

EDIT : I do have all the email conversations and acceptance notifications and do have the feedback as well.

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    I've never heard of anyone encountering this problem. Is your work grant-funded? Every grant I've encountered includes money for administrative costs, such as those associated with publications. Additionally, if you don't have money for publications, how do you have money to defray other research-associated costs? Publications are the currency of the researcher; I find your story very odd, and it would raise strong red flags about the management of your lab.
    – eykanal
    Commented Apr 23, 2012 at 13:40
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    It would help to know what field we're talking about. Publication practices and funding sources vary dramatically from field to field.
    – Henry
    Commented Apr 23, 2012 at 13:53
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    Man... your work may be awesome! Are you a Ph.D., M.Sc., B.Sc.? What's your subject matter? What journals are you talking about? I mean, depending on your status, depending on your university/college, I'm absolutely sure that you must have some funding, from anywhere... i.e., from your advisor (that may have interest in your work, of course), from your university (that may have interest in exhibiting its name worldwide), from a gov. agency, etc etc... Give us some more details... otherwise, as said by @eykanal, your story may be considered odd/weird by SE community
    – Ivan Machado
    Commented Apr 23, 2012 at 17:05

2 Answers 2

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Reputable journals will waive publication charges for authors who cannot pay them, so you should ask about that. If everything goes well, then that will simply solve your financial problems. I see only two ways you can get stuck:

(1) The journal insists you can pay, perhaps because your advisor has plenty of grant money, but your advisor refuses. In that case you have a serious problem, and it is much deeper than just paying for these publication charges; you need to sort things out with your advisor.

(2) The journal does not have a procedure for waiving the charges. In that case, the journal acceptance is worthless. The journals in this category are money-making operations with no academic validity. Nobody will care that they accepted your paper, because they just wanted your publication fees.

The first thing you need to determine is which case you are in. For example, one valid reason for an advisor to refuse to pay is because the journals are not reputable. If you are in that case, then you need to rethink everything. Otherwise, it sounds like you may be in a complicated situation with your advisor.

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    For example, you can start by checking whether the journal publishers are listed at scholarlyoa.com/publishers. If they are, then the librarian who compiled this list considers them predatory publishers, and acceptance won't mean much. If they aren't on the list, then that doesn't prove anything, since the list is far from complete, but at least you would have ruled out some of the worst publishers.
    – Anonymous Mathematician
    Commented Apr 23, 2012 at 14:06
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    they aren't present in the list
    – Asp.net my life
    Commented Apr 23, 2012 at 14:14
  • That's good. It sounds like you either need to talk with the journals about the possibility of waiving the charges, or with your advisor about what's going on.
    – Anonymous Mathematician
    Commented Apr 23, 2012 at 14:52
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This would raise a red flag for me generally - I've never published in a journal that had publication fees just for publishing the papers themselves. Color charges, sure, and if I had submitted to an open access journal they have fees, but nearly every one of them has a mechanism for waiving the fee in the case that the author can't pay. My four suggestions are this:

  • Make doubly-sure, as @AnonymousMathematician has stated, that you're not accidentally trying to get published in a for-profit vanity press journal. These won't actually do you much good.
  • Contact the journal and see if you can get the fees waived, if they are indeed a legitimate scientific journal.
  • Get in touch with your institution's librarians. Universities often have discount deals with some publishers, are members of groups that waive the fees, etc. Make sure you're not covered that way.
  • Stop submitting to journals with publication charges if you don't have grant backing. Submitted, or even accepted papers that aren't in press (and it sounds like will never see the light of day) don't do you much good. Those papers are currently just rotting there - no journal is good enough for you to let your work languish without publishing it.
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  • these are open access international journals mentioning a few ijca,ijcsi , jict.co.uk .. ijca has an impact factor 0.8 and ijcsi a 0.2
    – Asp.net my life
    Commented Apr 24, 2012 at 1:47
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    @Asp.netmylife Consult the journals to see if the fees can be waived. Are there no credible journals in your field that don't charge a fee?
    – Fomite
    Commented Apr 24, 2012 at 2:06
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    There's some good advice on recognizing dubious journals at UHD: library.uhd.edu/journalquality. If IJCA is the International Journal of Computer Applications then it meets most of these criteria for being a low-quality journal. (Note, for example, their odd claim to be "indexed" by Scribd, which isn't an academic site at all.)
    – Henry
    Commented Apr 24, 2012 at 3:44
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    Yeah, IJCSI and JICT are also very worrisome. IJCSI advertises notification by June 30 and publication by July 31 if you submit by May 31. JICT advertises publication by June 10 if you submit by April 30. These extremely rapid review times are not the way any reputable CS journal that I know of works, and they are not consistent with careful refereeing. I've never heard of these journals, but they do not look reassuring to me. I'd recommend looking elsewhere, especially if these journals insist on page charges you cannot afford.
    – Anonymous Mathematician
    Commented Apr 24, 2012 at 4:27
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    What makes these sorts of journals so problematic is that they try hard to blend in with the reputable journals, so without some experience or background it can be difficult to tell the difference. (See jfdp.org/forum/forum_docs/1013jfdp1040_1_032912094346.pdf for stories of people being tricked.)
    – Anonymous Mathematician
    Commented Apr 25, 2012 at 0:07

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