Can I charge authors an additional submission fee?

Overview

Scholastica makes it easy to set the manuscript submission fee for authors, and makes it easy to automatically transfer revenue from submission fees directly to the journal's bank account via Stripe Connect. Submission fees are a great way for Open Access journals to financially support their work by spreading the cost across all submitted manuscripts.

Note that this feature is not available for law reviews.

Configuring the fee

Step 1: Connecting your bank account

Before collecting an additional submission fee for your journal, you'll need to sign up for Stripe Connect. Scholastica uses Stripe to process credit card transactions and Stripe Connect to transfer your journal's portion of the submission fee to your bank account.

To set up Stripe Connect, start by going to My Journals > Settings > Billing

Next to "Who pays for submissions?", the journal must be set to the "Author Pays" model (it wouldn't make much sense for the journal to charge itself more money for each submission!) and then click on the text to "edit fee".

Click Yes, I would like to set up a custom submission fee and then click Connect with Stripe.

You'll be taken to Stripe's website. Enter your business details and click Authorize access to this account.

You'll be taken back to Scholastica and will see a message saying, "Your Stripe Connect account has been successfully activated." You can now move the slider to adjust your additional submission fee.

Step 2: Setting the fee

You will see a slider to set the total author fee. The minimum is $10 (which is Scholastica's base submission fee), and the maximum is $90 USD. Click and drag the slider to set the total submission fee. Click Update Billing Info to save the changes.

Breakdown of submission fees

Here is a detailed explanation of how submission fees are calculated and distributed.

Base submission fee

Scholastica charges $10 for every (non-law journal) submission. Journals have the option of paying this fee in order to make submissions free to authors or of having the authors pay the fee.

Additional submission fee

Journals can charge an additional fee beyond Scholastica's $10 base fee. This additional fee is paid to the journal, minus Stripe's processing charge for the transaction.

Stripe processing charge

Stripe charges 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction. Journals are only responsible for Stripe's processing charge if they are charging an additional submission fee beyond Scholastica's $10 base fee.

For example

If your journal sets its total submission fee at $50:

• The $10 base submission fee goes to Scholastica
• The $40 additional fee:
  • (2.9% of $50 = $1.45) + $0.30 = $1.75 goes to Stripe
  • $40 - $1.75 = $38.25 goes to your journal

What the author sees

None of the fee breakdown is visible to the author. They simply see one price: the total submission fee.

On screen

When the author is submitting, they simply see a credit card form on the submission page asking them to pay the full submission fee price.

On their credit card

Authors will see a single charge on their credit card with the name of your business name listed as the source. This is determined when you sign up for Stripe Connect.