A paper on chicory plants — also known as “blue daisies” — won’t get its moment in the sun.

The “accepted author version” was published online in June, in Plant Signaling & Behavior. But before the so-called “version of record” could make it into an official issue of the journal — which is online-only — it was retracted.

Why? The authors apparently couldn’t pay the fees required to publish the paper. Here’s the short note, which is titled “Editorial Retraction:”

We, the Editor and Publisher of Plant Signaling & Behavior are removing the following article: Kimiya Ghanaatiyan, Hossein Sadeghi: “Divergences in hormonal and enzymatic antioxidant responses in Chicory ecotypes to salt stress,” Plant Signaling & Behavior. The authors were not able to pay the required page charges for this paper.

Instructions for submitting to the journal explain what those charges are:

Page charges apply at a rate of $100 per page or partial page used for articles classified as Reports, Research Papers, Technical Papers, Brief Reports and Short Communications.

Corresponding author Hossein Sadeghi, who works at Shiraz University in Iran, told us that he withdrew the article after his institution would not pay for its publication, and that he has submitted it to another journal — one that is free.

The study explores how chicory, often used for culinary or medical purposes, becomes stressed when growing in salty environments. According to the abstract:

The results showed that germination characteristics and primary seedling growth were decreased in both ecotypes with increasing in salinity severity. The effects of salinity on radicle and plumule length as well as seedling weight were the same as its effects on seed germination.

We’ve only found a few other instances where a paper was pulled over fee issues. Dental Materials Journal retracted three papers for that reason, and GM Crops & Food — like Plant Signaling and Behavior, published by Taylor & Francis — retracted one paper over a fee dispute.

We emailed the journal editors, one of whom passed our note along to the publisher. We will update this post if we hear back.

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