Nature goes open access

[Hibush]

Springer Nature announced that the flagship journal, Nature, will be hybrid open access. That is, subscribers can read everything, everyone can read the OA articles.

This is the top-of-the-heap journal that many striving scientists try to get into Nature as the definitive mark that their research is important. You cannot beat it for prestige.

So what is that OA fee? A record-setting €9,500.

Time to revise the research budget!

The article also gives a glimpse of why it costs so much to produce this online journal.

"Roughly 4,500 articles were published in Nature or a Nature-branded research journal. Hundreds of staff members work on Nature and Nature-branded journals: almost 200 editors with doctorates, plus editorial assistants and art, production and copyediting staff members."

That gives a ratio of about 22 articles per editor, so each article needs to cover about two weeks of pay for the editor and a couple of production staff.

(Only 890 of those are in Nature itself, the other journals have OA fees closer to €2,500.)

Interthreadularity: If you have not heard back from a Nature editor after a year, they lost your submission.

[mamselle]

I had to laugh after reading the title the second time and realizing it didn't mean what I first thought it meant.

I mean, hasn't the natural world always been relatively open-access?

;--}

M.

[Hibush]

I had to laugh after reading the title the second time and realizing it didn't mean what I first thought it meant.

I mean, hasn't the natural world always been relatively open-access?

;--}

M.

Now that you mention it, good headline for Covid mitigation.

Can the thread titles be formatted? I didn't think to italicize to indicate the title rather than Mother N.

[fizzycist]

A whole lotta whining on twitter about the price, but I think most researchers will find a way to pay it to get into Nature. I certainly would--it is only a few percent of the overall research budget that would be required to get a paper in my field accepted at Nature anyway.

The really crazy new policy is the one where you pay a little more than $2k up front to try to get into Nature Physics or Nature Communications. But if you don't get into either you have to go to Communications in Physics or else take your reviews and leave with no refund. Who the heck would do that?!

The real fools in this system are us reviewers who do the hard work for free. And all to benefit a for-profit multinational publicly-traded corporation's bottom line. The shareholders must be lol'ing.

[Hibush]

A whole lotta whining on twitter about the price, but I think most researchers will find a way to pay it to get into Nature. I certainly would--it is only a few percent of the overall research budget that would be required to get a paper in my field accepted at Nature anyway.

Doing research that gets you a Nature paper is expensive. I can easily imagine millions of dollars invested in a research program that supports the eventual Nature paper.

From a granting agency perspective, having a Nature paper as a product is great. Having it be OA just increases the value of the research you invested in. I don't see them resisting this budget item at all.

Can you imagine writing in the budget narrative "Since we anticipate the the proposed research will warrant OA publication in Nature, we request $11,400 for publication fees in year 3."   Can you imagine the proposal reviewers' faces when they read that sentence?

[zyzzx]

A whole lotta whining on twitter about the price, but I think most researchers will find a way to pay it to get into Nature. I certainly would--it is only a few percent of the overall research budget that would be required to get a paper in my field accepted at Nature anyway.

Doing research that gets you a Nature paper is expensive. I can easily imagine millions of dollars invested in a research program that supports the eventual Nature paper.

Not necessarily. In my field Nature paper research can actually be really cheap - a large proportion of the papers are analyses of publicly available data, numerical modeling, or a combination of the two. These cost pretty much nothing but time. Occasionally there will be one that's resulted from some super expensive effort, but this is really not the norm in my field.

Science makes all their papers open access a year after publication for free, which seems like a much better deal.

$2k up front for Nature Communications is crazy. Guess I'm no longer reviewing for them if they're explicitly selling my work like that.