Recognition that non-science academics often lacked specific research funding led the California-based commercial publisher to launch Sage Open with an article fee of just $695, compared with PLoS ONE's $1,350 - and $5,000 at Elsevier's Cell titles. Sage Open has so far received more than 1,400 manuscripts, and published more than 160 articles. However, a recent survey of authors indicated that more than 70 per cent of Sage Open's accepted authors had paid the article fee out of their own pocket, while only 15 per cent of all articles published in 2012 across Sage's fleet of humanities and social sciences journals derived from research projects with allocated funding.