We encourage payment by credit card (How can I pay by credit card?), and discourage payments by wire or cheque (What are the payment methods?).
There is a surcharge ("handling fee") of 7% on the invoice if the invoice is not paid by credit card, which includes the bank fees (both the sending and the receiving banks deduct fees), as well as an in-house fee for the additional processing work required. The reason is that often it takes us considerable in-house resources to associate these kinds of payments with outstanding invoices, as sadly many institutions seem to be unable to properly quote our invoice numbers in wire transfers or cheque payments. Sometimes we have multiple outstanding invoices from an institution and it takes us "detective" work, including emails or phone calls to financial officers, to find out which invoice a specific payment was meant for. Sometimes institutions get the bank account wrong, or wire in the wrong currency, or send cheques to the wrong address. Sometimes institutions require vendor forms, purchasing orders, or other additional paperwork. Sometimes organizations send us remittance advices with their own purchasing order number, and quote only this number in their wire payments. Many support tickets filed by authors relate to questions regarding wire transfers or cheques. Managing all these extra communications requires additional in-house resources which we cover through this extra fee, which is hopefully also an incentive for authors and institutions to pay by credit card or to look into institutional memberships.
Payments by wire transfer or cheque also often add many weeks of extra time after acceptance of a manuscript, distorting our key success metric of timely publication (days from acceptance to publication), even though these delays are not our responsibility.
We hope that with this additional disincentive to wire funds or send cheques, institutions are incentivized to use 21st century methods of payments, which include online payment by credit card.
If you are the representative or financial officer of an institution, please talk to us (support@jmir.org) about other forms to make payment more efficient.
Institutional Membership
If you are receiving funding through membership in an institutional deal, the 7% handling fee will be waived.
Please contact your institutional librarian or JMIR for more information about institutional memberships. You can also navigate to "Transform to Open Science": Transformative Institutional Memberships and Plan P – JMIR Publications.
Related:
- What are the payment methods?
- Can I pay by wire/bank transfer? Where is your bank account information?
- Why has a 7% handling fee been added to my invoice and how can I switch to credit card payments?