For 9500 €, Nature magazines will make your article free to read | Science

By Jeffrey BrainardNovember 24, 2020 at 1:00 a.m.

The elite Nature journal family, including flagship product Nature, announced today that it is taking the step towards open access in scientific publishing. Journals will become among the first highly selective titles to allow any author to pay a publication fee to make articles immediately free to read once published. Such open access agreements are demanded by some European funders and foundations who seek to eliminate subscription payment walls in order to speed up the flow of scientific information.

NatureThe copyright fee of € 9,500 is considered the highest of any newspaper. But publishing group Nature Research says there is a need to cover the costs of full-time publishers and others who produce Nature and its 32 other primary research journals.

The Nature Group also announced a trial of a low cost open access option: when authors submit a manuscript to one of three journals –Genetics of nature, Nature’s Methods, and Physics of nature– they could pay € 4,790 or less per article for open access, if they agree to participate in a process called “guided review”. In this process, if the editors of the three journals and their colleagues decide that a manuscript is worthy enough to be sent for peer review, they will ask the authors to pay an upfront fee of € 2,190 to cover the revision costs, then pay extra cost if the item is accepted.

The changes will come into force in January 2021, which coincides with the implementation date of Plan S, the mandate of donors – mainly in Europe – for open access. Plan S funders prohibit authors who publish articles about research they have funded from placing those articles in journals that publish new articles only behind paywalls. One way for authors to comply is to choose journals that charge an “article processing fee” – like the one Nature journals are instituting – to make content immediately accessible.

After the Plan S proposal in September 2018, some writers decried it as limiting academic freedom and career advancement opportunities, in part because the policy was supposed to ban publication in Nature and other selective reviews that did not offer open access options. An analysis found that 35% of articles published in Nature in 2017, recognized the support of a Plan S funder. Overall, this analysis, carried out by analytics firm Clarivate based on its Web of Science database, found that only 6% of all the scientific articles published in 2017 had received support from Plan S donors.

Nature journals are now embarking on open access for all authors “because we see that this is the future, this is where the scientific enterprise is naturally going to go,” said James Butcher, vice president of group reviews. And open access is “kind of in our DNA,” he added: Springer Nature, the parent company of the Nature group, is already the world’s largest publisher of open access articles. The for-profit company publishes 600 exclusively open access journals and 2,200 other “hybrid” journals that both charge for subscriptions and offer open access publication to authors for a fee.

Some observers are worried NatureThe publication fee of $ 9,500 is so high that it threatens to split authors into two tiers – those in institutions that are wealthy or have access to funds to pay, and everyone else.

“Early career researchers in high- and low-income backgrounds typically won’t be able to afford it, so Nature will simply remain the preserve of already established senior teachers – how is that good for someone other than Springer Nature? Wrote Michael Marks, who studies infectious diseases at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, in an email.

“The fees seem incredibly high to me,” he added. The Lancet, which has a higher review impact factor than Nature, charges an open access publishing fee of $ 5,000. “I find it hard to believe that Nature“S… the editorial policies or the quality of the output are better,” Marks wrote.

Springer Nature has a publication fee waiver policy for authors who can demonstrate financial need for its journals which publish all content in open access. The Nature Group plans to eventually convert their research titles to this model, and then the waiver policy would apply, spokeswoman Susie Winter said. Until then, each Nature title will continue to review and publish the submitted manuscripts in a conventional manner (no processing fee), to appear on publication behind a subscription-based paywall. But once a Nature title is converted to Open Access, authors will lose that free publishing option.

Some institutions may end up paying their authors’ fees from a dedicated pot or through an agreement with the publisher that allows their scientists to read journals and publish articles in open access. In October, the Nature group concluded its first such agreement. It allows German institutions that subscribe to Nature journals to also publish open access articles under a global agreement which equates to a publication cost per article of € 9,500. But these agreements “take time for institutions to fall into place and not work for all organizations,” said Alison Mitchell, journal manager at Springer Nature. The Nature group has therefore decided to now offer the option to all authors.

The unusual guided review experience will present authors with choices. Nature’s editors will launch an initial call to find out if the manuscripts submitted for this pilot project are good enough to appear in one of six Nature journals: the Genetics of nature, Nature’s Methods, or Physics of nature, or in Nature’s communications, Communications biology, or Communications physics. If the article exceeds this minimum limit, then authors who want open access must pay an “editorial evaluation fee” of € 2,190 to cover the editing costs. Authors would pay an additional € 2,600 if the article is accepted by one of the four journals with “Nature” in the title; the total fees would be roughly half of Nature Publishing’s highest open access fees. For the papers that succeed Communications biology or Communications physics, the authors would pay an additional € 800.

Authors who do not wish to publish in the journal that accepts the article will lose their € 2,190 fee. But the publisher says the authors will be able to use the detailed assessment report to refine the manuscript.

Guided review is an alternative to the conventional practices of subscription journals and others that offer paid open access options. Their editors usually review submitted manuscripts at no cost to the authors, and those who charge a publication fee do not receive them until the journals have accepted the papers.

Publishing industry commentators have called for approaches such as Nature’s Guided Review to reduce costly duplication of work by critics and journals. Currently, many authors submit manuscripts first to the best journal they believe will accept it. If that newspaper rejects the article, they repeat the process with a second choice. This leads to multiple rounds of peer reviews of the same article, placing a burden on scientists who volunteer as unpaid external reviewers and on editors who organize the reviews.

Some analysts say charging authors for peer review – an approach known as a “submission fee” – could reduce the burden by forcing authors to be more selective and realistic. But many journals have criticized the idea, fearing it might push authors to journals that don’t charge such fees.

Butcher says one of the reasons scientists should be prepared to pay his review fees is that they will receive reviews that provide authors with more useful and in-depth feedback than those found in conventional review reports. by peers. Assessments, which will be longer than 10 pages, should include information on complex issues, such as the extent to which the study meets standards designed to promote data sharing and replicability.

“At the end of the day, we believe publication costs should be divided so that they reflect the different services provided by publishers,” said Robert Kiley, head of open research at Wellcome Trust, one of the signatories to the Plan S, in a press release. experimentation by nature will help to inform this approach.