Salmon Egg wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@news60.forteinc.com:
In my experience as a biomedical researcher, page charges are paid by the investigators' (investigator's) funds. Usually these are grant funds of some kind. It may be possible to request an exemption from the publisher, but I'm not giving you more than a 15% chance of success in that (zero if the publisher is Elsevier). It may be better for your wallet if you find a journal with no or lesser page charges. With the current wide distribution of search and abstracting services, it is by far not as important any more (other than prestige) to get published in a "good" journal. Of course, the critiques and press coverage would be better ...
What area would your paper be in?