How much did you get paid to do all that?

Today in lab I discussed the details of journal article writing and publishing with my students (they'll be writing two journal article style papers during the semester; today was prep for that). After having the students read over a few "real" articles and figure out what was contained in each part of the papers, I briefly summarized the steps a scientist goes through to publish an article. The list had about 10 steps from research completion to an article being in press, and I had fun describing my recent submission efforts to Ecology (where, btw, I got rejected) and subsequent acceptance at another journal more than 2 years after I'd written the original manuscript. After this description I waited for questions; one student raised his hand and asked,

Student: "So, how much did you get paid for all this?"

Me: "For everything after the first step, I haven't gotten paid a cent."

Student: "Oh."

I then went on to describe that not only was the work unpaid, but some journals require that authors pay a per-page fee for their articles to be published.

I think I may have just killed the research enthusiasm of my students :)