In this option, they might reject your paper outright, and you’re out $2,600 with nothing to show for it. It’s actually even worse: in addition to the new $11,500 open access fee, Nature also announced an option (they call it a “new OA pilot”) whereby you pay them $2,600 for a preliminary review, and they evaluate your paper for six of their journals.
Rather than a move to support open access, this new fee is little more than a money grab. Nature’s outrageously high fee also excludes virtually every scientist from low and middle-income countries, as fellow Forbes blogger (and scientist) Madhukar Pai wrote last week. The only reason they still do is because they’ve done so for decades, and it’s hard to change an entrenched system. Given that most research is paid for by the public, it makes no sense at all to allow for-profit journals to control access. As every scientist knows, science only progresses by sharing its discoveries, and barriers such as subscription fees only slow down that progress. The open access movement, which I’ve long been a part of, wants to make all scientific research freely available to anyone, with no costs or delays. (Or maybe Springer thinks that charging $11,500 to make a paper open access is an innovative move? It does take chutzpah, I’ll grant them that.) Springer and the other for-profit journals have been fighting open access since the mid-2000s, and this latest announcement is yet one more salvo in their battle against it. (Who wants to publish in a “typical” journal after reading that?) They also claim to be an “innovator in open access,” which is, frankly, nonsense. over 30 times more than papers in a typical journal,” they write. “Research published in Nature and the Nature research journals is downloaded. It’s true that Nature publishes some highly prestigious scientific journals, but their announcement of this new “gold” open access policy just drips with self-congratulation. Not content with their enormous profits, it now seems that Springer Nature wants to suck even more money out of academic science. In fact, they’re even more profitable now than they were before the Internet. One might expect that journals would change their model, but they haven’t. For over two decades, though, we have been distributing papers electronically, and there’s almost no need for paper copies.
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