Recently, I published a response article to a paper that had serious implications for conservation policy in the Western Canadian boreal forest.

It did very little for my career. Writing it took time away from my main research, and it will doubtless result in tension with fellow scientists. It also put my scientific reputation on the line.

But I felt compelled to respond given my belief that the statistics and handling of original data did not support the original author¡¯s conclusions. After all, if papers continue to be distributed and cited without correction, the associated errors can propagate throughout the literature and compromise entire fields of study. If, as in this case, the papers have serious practical implications, they can also lead to bad policy, as well as undermining societal trust in the scientific process.

For these reasons, scientific journals that are genuinely committed to scientific discourse and scrutiny should feel an equal compulsion to publish well-reasoned challenges to published work that are motivated by the pursuit of truth, rather than personal grudges or scientific rivalry. Although all research articles in respectable journals go through peer-review prior to publication, technical mistakes are inevitable, and sometimes these mistakes are critical to the paper¡¯s claims.

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Scientific advancement is greatly frustrated if these mistakes are not acknowledged and, when appropriate, corrected publicly. Moreover, public trust in science is undermined when dissent is suppressed and findings are presented as if they are unchallengeable. So why are journals erecting high paywalls to such scientific self-correction?

My team was charged more than $4,000 to publish our response. And the original authors had to pay another $4,000 to publish a subsequent follow-up ¨C on top of the similar amount they were charged to publish their original paper.

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To be clear, I was initially offered the option to publish at no financial cost, but without the open access option. Yet the original article was open access, so if I had accepted the free option, readers would be free to read the original work but would have to pay to access my response. In other words, they would have to pay to be able to properly evaluate the merit of the original work.

Nor did it make sense to publish my response elsewhere such as a different journal or personal blog. It is key to have responses linked directly to the original article, in the same journal, for increased visibility. Though I was fortunate in my academic position that my research partners and I were able to pay the $4,000, I deeply resented doing so.

While publishing a response article does entail some financial costs to the journal, associated with staff salary and copy-editing services, if the journal profited from the original flawed article then those profits should be directed towards clarifying their error. They should not be raising financial barriers to what could be seen as a form of post-publication peer review ¨C carried out at no cost to them and augmenting the pre-publication peer-review process that academics also carry out for journals voluntarily.

The general issue of journal publishing charges ¨C which can exceed $12,000 for a paper in the most prestigious outlets ¨C is widely debated, amid concerns that such fees can lock some scholars out. But less scrutiny has been paid to the prices charged for formal response papers, which are just as exclusionary. As a community, we are losing out on diverse insights and perspectives, and we are potentially receiving a false perception of scientific consensus around certain papers.

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Journals would ultimately benefit from switching to a model encouraging free responses from qualified scientists. Requiring those responses to rely on credible, technical critiques rather than personal opinion ¨C and peer reviewing them accordingly ¨C would limit potential malicious rebuttals. And facilitating the publication of rebuttals might incentivise journals to commit more time and effort in the peer-review process to avoid publication of flawed articles in the first place.

Either way, scientists should want to submit their work to journals that consistently strive for high standards of both rigour and transparency, so those journals would quickly rise in prestige. A win for science would be a win for publishers, too.

Andrew Barnas is a senior research associate and postdoctoral fellow at the Applied Conservation Macro Ecology Laboratory at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada.