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Human Research Ethics Research Integrity

Nature journals reveal terms of landmark open-access option – Nature (Holly Else | November 2020)

Posted by Dr Gary Allen in Research Integrity on January 12, 2021
Keywords: Journal, Publication ethics, Research integrity, Research results, Researcher responsibilities

The Linked Original Item was Posted On November 25, 2020

Through a keyhole we see a solitary female figure stares out into the cosmos

The journals will charge authors up to €9,500 to make research papers free to read, in a long-awaited alternative to subscription-only publishing.

Publisher Springer Nature has announced how scientists can make their papers in its most selective titles free to read as soon as they are published — part of a long-awaited move to offer open-access publishing in the Nature family of journals.

Given the cost of an institutional subscription, we are not sure this constitutes a Rolls Royce price. A reasonable question is, will this break the model? People want to publish in Nature so they can say they published in Nature. A member of the AHRECS team has had 5 Nature papers as a co-author and the relevant university thought it was so special they gave their research fund a significant internal boost each time. In that case, they did not take the funds as a personal reward as some did. But truly, was the Nature paper any better than any other paper that year? Probably not.  The problem is, our focus on publication in high-profile journals is distorting research in counterproductive ways.

From 2021, the publisher will charge €9,500, US$11,390 or £8,290 to make a paper open access (OA) in Nature and 32 other journals that currently keep most of their articles behind paywalls and are financed by subscriptions. It is also trialling a scheme that would halve that price for some journals, under a common-review system that might guide papers to a number of titles.

OA advocates are pleased that the publisher has found ways to offer open access to all authors, which it first committed to in April. But they are concerned about the price. The development is a “very significant” moment in the movement to make scientific articles free for all to read, but “it looks very expensive”, says Stephen Curry, a structural biologist at Imperial College London.

The change was spurred by the ‘Plan S’ movement, in which funders are mandating that their grant recipients must make their work OA as soon as it is published; the funders will generally cover researchers’ costs for this in journals that meet their requirements. Last month, Springer Nature signed a deal that allowed some German scientists to publish openly in Nature-branded journals for free, with a €9,500-per-article price baked into their institutions’ subscription fees. But today’s announcement reveals the options for any author who wants to publish OA. (Nature is editorially independent of its publisher.)

Read the rest of this discussion piece

Related Reading

Open-access Plan S to allow publishing in any journal – Nature (Richard Van Noorden | July 2020)

Publishers roll out alternative routes to open access – Science (Jeffrey Brainard | March 2020)

Plan S and the Transformation of Scholarly Communication: Are We Missing the Woods? – Scholarly Kitchen (Alison Mudditt | June 2019)

Ambitious open-access Plan S delayed to let research community adapt – Nature (Holly Else | May 2019)

(Australia) Industrial umpire lashes universities ‘obsessed’ with rankings and reputation – Sydney Morning Herald (Nick Bonyhady & Natassia Chrysanthos | March 2020)

Plan U: Universal access to scientific and medical research via funder preprint mandates (Papers: Richard Sever, et al | June 2019)

(Includes an update 07/06/2019) A report about Plan S’s potential effects on journals marks a busy week for the open-access movement – Science (Jeffrey Brainard | March 2019)

Open Access, Academic Freedom, and the Spectrum of Coercive Power – Scholarly Kitchen (Rick Anderson | November 2018)

High-profile subscription journals critique Plan S – Nature (Holly Else | February 2019)

Will the world embrace Plan S, the radical proposal to mandate open access to science papers? – Science (Tania Rabesandratana | January 2019)

Funder open access platforms – a welcome innovation? – LSE Impact Blog (Tony Ross-Hellauer, et al | July 2018)

Radical open-access plan could spell end to journal subscriptions – Nature (Holly Else | September 2018)

Europe’s open-access drive escalates as university stand-offs spread – Science (Holly Else | May 2018)

Scholarly communications shouldn’t just be open, but non-profit too – LSE Impact Blog (Jefferson Pooley | August 2017)

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