The following comments were in reply to a query about who (first author, first author's advisor, all co-authors equally, etc) typically pays for journal publication fees:

From the Head Graduate Advisor (but see below for others' experiences in practice):

The department does not cover these kinds of charges.  It is the responsibility of the major professor.  If they do not have the funds, most journals will waiver them if the lead author is a graduate student.  The student should get in contact with the associate editor of the journal and request such a waiver. If the article is open access, the library does have a fund to defer the costs of publication.  The funds need to be applied for at the same time the paper is submitted but there may be some wiggle room if there is a student involved.  Here are the details: http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/brii/

Replies from ESPM students:

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The library is the way to go for open access!  And open access is the way to go generally.  But if that's not an option I'd say talk to the senior author on the paper and they'll probably have preferences on how to pay (hopefully they would do it, that seems to be the norm to me).  If there is no senior author then frankly I'd look at ways to avoid page charges (gray scale figures, go for open access journal + UCB library, etc) and short of that just discuss it openly among coauthors probably shooting for splitting the cost evenly.  Never been in that situation myself.  Be interested to hear how it works out.

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I have no idea.  In the one paper I have published, my advisor covered half and the University covered half.  We were the only two authors, so I have no idea outside of that.

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In my experience, the advisor of the first author has always covered the fees in their entirety.

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I would be interested to hear what other people say about this, but my experience is that the first author pays the page charges. If you are a first author but you are a graduate student or postdoc, then it is typically your adviser that pays. This is slightly tangential, but if you are publishing open access, there is money on campus available for covering the open access fee. I was able to get $1500 from campus to publish open access on one of my papers, so that was free money that my adviser would have had to pay. 

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To add my voice to the fray: in my experience (or maybe just in my field), the P.I. of the author pays the whole fee. However, the UCB library system will cover most or all of the costs if you publish in an open source journal (http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/brii/)

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At least in my experience it is the lab of the first and corresponding author who pays for the publication (who are usually the ones that contribute the most to the paper). My PI covers all the publication costs of our papers (students, postdocs and staff), and when we are co-authors in a paper submitted by a collaborator, they cover the publication costs, not us.

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Postdoc X is going through some of this now, and former advisors who are on the paper don't seem to be putting up the money...X asked if they would pay, and X feels like they should pay, but they never responded about it.  X has additional co-authors who were former advisors.  They didn't do any direct work on the paper beyond checking for typos, but their name is on it.  

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 I recently got a paper accepted at [blank], a Springer Journal which charges $3000 for open access. This journal is a hybrid journal so BRII would have reimbursed half of that which is generous but that still left me $1500 shy. I emailed Springer asking if they've give me a discount and was told flat out 'no'. I did this paper on my own so there was no grant to cover it, and I didn't have time to go begging, so I just went with the unpaid option. My plan however is to put a PDF version on my own website, which is allowed as long as its not the PDF from the journal. I'm also going to put a Kindle version online once I figure out how to do the conversion, although I should probably double-check the fine print on the copyright agreement.

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Responses from the Library re: BRII (Berkeley Research Impact Initiative), campus' open access fee waiver/ support:

• The Library's policy for reimbursement of the article processing charges (APCs) under BRII is that the entire journal needs to be made available open access. Some journals are classified as "hybrid" - which means that they are for the most part just a subscription journal which *also* offers the option for a researcher to pay an APC to have their individual article published open access immediately. We can't reimburse for articles published in hybrid journals because essentially the university would be paying twice for the same article: once when we subscribe to it via the library subscriptions, and then again if we're paying the researcher to make it open access via paying the APC. We can help you determine if a particular journal is a fully open access journal. 

• The University of California has been entering into systemwide "transformative open access agreements" with several publishers, including Elsevier. The purpose of these agreements is to support open access publishing by UC authors, and also to contain the costs of journal subscriptions. So, this means that if you were to have an article accepted in most Elsevier journals, the UC can help make it open access by contributing some funds to defray the APC. You can see all the publishers with which UC has entered into these new agreements with here. And Elsevier specific ones here. 

• You can only apply and only receive financial support once every calendar year from BRII. 

• The financial support limit for articles is $2,500, and $10,000 for books. 

• The 3 step process to apply for BRII funding, also found here: 

  • 1. You submit your article to a fully open access journal. If it is accepted, then you pay the APC. (Step 1)

  • 2. You fill out the BRII reimbursement form (Step 2). This is to get you in the BRII system, and if you've made sure you've met all the eligibility requirements, then it'll be approved. 

  • 3. Once it's approved, then you gather the documentation outlined in Step 3 and submit it to us for reimbursement. (sorry, we can't pay the publisher directly; it's just a consequence of how the financial rules are, so that's why it's setup as a reimbursement process)

Conclusion

So there you have it. The basic "advisor pays" norm seems to become complicated when you leave an institution, aren't working directly on somebody's grant, working with multiple advisors, money is tight, etc.