<p>I am not familiar with that publication or its sources of support, so I can’t speak to whether these are normal practices for that publication. But if the publication is a non-profit entity it does occur to me that a request for a donation might have been generated by the fund-raising division of the organization (in which case you would have received it any way because you are on a fund-raising mailing list of theirs), and not represent a request for payment of the equivalent of page charges in advance of review of the article.</p>