The case for article submission fees

For scientific journal articles the cost of publishing is almost exclusively covered by the articles that are accepted for publication. Either by the published authors or by the libraries. Advertisement and other items like the organization of conferences are probably not a very significant source of income. I don't want to argue here again the value of publishers and how we should be decoupling the costs of publishing (close to zero) from peer-review, accreditation and filtering. Instead I just want to explore the idea for a very obvious form a income that is not used - submission fees. Why don't journals charge all potential authors a fixed cost per submission, even if the article ends up being rejected ?  I am sure publishers have considered this option and they have reached the conclusion that this is not viable. I would like to know why and maybe someone reading this can give a strong argument against. Hopefully someone from the publishing side that has crunched the numbers. The strongest reason against that I can imagine would be a reduction in submission rates. If only some publishers adopt this fee authors will send their papers to journals that don't charge for submission. Would the impact be that significant ? For journals with high-rejection rates this might even be useful since it would preferentially deter authors that are less confident about the value of their work. For journals with lower reject...
Source: Public Rambling - Category: Bioinformaticians Tags: publishing Source Type: blogs