Nature Reviews Reveal Terms of Historic Open Access Option

Publisher Springer Nature has announced how scientists can make their papers free to read in their most selective titles upon publication – as part of a long-awaited initiative to provide open access publication in the family of journals Nature.

From 2021, the publisher will charge € 9,500, US $ 11,390 or £ 8,290 to create an Open Access Print (OA) in Nature and 32 other journals that currently keep most of their articles behind payment walls and are funded by subscriptions. It is also testing a system that would halve that price for some journals, as part of a common review system that could guide articles to a number of titles.

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

The change was spurred by the ‘Plan S’ movement, in which funders demand that their grant recipients must do their OA work as soon as it is released; funders will usually cover the costs of researchers for this in journals that meet their needs. Last month, Springer Nature signed an agreement allowing some German scientists to publish for free in Nature-branded journals, with a price of € 9,500 per article built into their institutions’ subscription fees. But today’s announcement reveals options for any author who wants to publish OA. (Nature is editorial independent of its publisher.)

The editors of extremely selective journals, such as Nature and Science, have been trying to figure out how to switch subscriptions to OA since the announcement of Plan S. Much of their production costs come from evaluating manuscripts that are ultimately rejected; when revenues can only be collected from the few published articles, the per article fee is high.

High price

No other journal charges up to € 9,500 per OA article: the highest fees elsewhere are less than $ 6,000 (approximately € 5,000). Some OA advocates criticize Springer Nature’s fees as being too high. Peter Suber, director of the Harvard Office for Scholarly Communication in Cambridge, Massachusetts, says it is a “prestige tax” because it will pay for the high rejection rates of journals, but will not guarantee, to its notice, better quality or better visibility. . “I think it would be absurd for any funder, university or author to pay it,” he says. But Lisa Hinchliffe, librarian at the University of Illinois at Urbana – Champaign, says the fees aren’t necessarily too high for authors. “I think many writers will find this to be acceptable value for money,” she says.

Juan Pablo Alperin, communications researcher at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, says that although the announcement “signals that universal access is inevitable,” the costs are out of reach for researchers in poorer countries .

A spokesperson for Springer Nature responds that the costs are higher than for other titles because the Nature-branded journals review many more articles than what is published, and because they employ editors and associates. internal press, whose work is of “great value” to researchers. “Making comparisons is difficult because no other highly selective journal portfolio offers OA on this scale,” they say. Authors who do not choose OA can continue to freely publish their research behind a paywall, notes the spokesperson: these articles are available to subscribers, and authors can make their accepted manuscripts available online after a certain time; for Nature or six months after publication.

The group of funders backing Plan S, called cOAlition S, says publishers should provide data to break down the relationship between publication fees and the services provided. “Once this information is available, the research community will be in a better position to decide whether the fees charged by publishers are fair and reasonable,” says coalition coordinator Robert Kiley, also head of open research at the fund’s funder. Wellcome biomedical research in London. .

“ Guided ” OA pilot

Springer Nature is also introducing a system that would cut open access fees by about half for some journals, which it is trying out. Physics of nature, Genetics of nature and Nature’s Methods. Under this program, called Guided OA, authors submit manuscripts and – if they pass a qualifying exam – pay a non-refundable fee of € 2,190 to cover an editorial review and the peer review process. . In return, they receive a review paper, which the editor says includes a more detailed editorial review than conventional review reports, and are told for which Springer Nature title their work is recommended.

Authors who submit to Physics of nature, for example, could be accepted into this journal or be informed of the revisions necessary to achieve it; they could be guided to less selective journals Nature communications or Communications physics; or their manuscript could be rejected. They can then leave with their report or, if accepted, pay an additional fee of € 2,600 to publish in Physics of nature or Nature communications. The total fee of € 4,790 is half of the standard OA fees for Physics of nature, and a slight increase in the price of the edition in Nature communications, the only title of the Nature brand that is already fully OA. The recharge costs are 800 € for Communications physics, which again makes the total cost a slight increase over the current price in this OA newspaper; The increase is to cover the additional editorial work involved in the guided OA route compared to direct submissions to these journals, the editor says.

This mechanism “shares the cost more evenly among multiple authors” and will save time by avoiding multiple review cycles in different journals, says James Butcher, vice president of journals at Nature Portfolio and BMC, a house of edition owned by Springer Nature. Hinchliffe sees it as “a creative experience for authors and publishers to manage financial risk.”

The program might be tempting for researchers hoping to publish in a Nature-branded journal, Alperin says. Compared to the full-price OA option, it “offers a lower initial barrier to entry with a higher pass threshold,” he says. But peer reviewers who evaluated the manuscript as part of this program might think that Nature titles “essentially sell their work for free to authors” if a revised article ultimately goes unpublished, says Curry.

Test

Kiley will follow the idea with interest. “At the end of the day, we think publishing costs should be allocated so that they reflect the different services provided by publishers, and this experience in [Springer Nature] will help inform this approach, ”he says.

Nature family journals have committed to increasing their OA content over time, so most Plan S funders have said they will pay their OA fees, despite a general reluctance to support OA. hybrid journals (which keep some articles behind a paywall and make others open). But some, including the European Commission and the Dutch Research Council (NWO), have yet to accept it.

Other publishers of highly selective journals have yet to announce policies in response to Plan S. Cell Press (owned by Elsevier in Amsterdam) says the journal Cell is in the process of finalizing its approach: it currently offers open access publications at $ 5,900, but only to authors whose funding body “has an appropriate agreement” with the journal. This policy is not suitable for Plan S, says Kiley.

Science-branded journal publisher, the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington DC, says it’s still thinking about how to fit in with Plan S. Since 2013, it’s allowed authors to publish a accepted version of their article in an online repository when their article is published. But that doesn’t satisfy Plan S backers, who demand that the manuscripts be shared under an open license that allows anyone to redistribute or adapt the work. ScienceCurrently, the policy does not allow this.