Nature And 32 other subscription titles in the Nature Family will offer open access access publications from 2021.Deposit: Nature
Publisher Springer Nature has announced how scientists can make their papers free to read as soon as their papers are published in their most selective titles – part of a long-awaited move to make the long-awaited release of open-access access to the journal Nature Family.
From 2021, the publisher will charge 9 9,500, US 11,390 or, 8,290 to create a paper open (access) Nature And 32 other journals that currently hold most of their articles behind pay-per-views and are funded by subscriptions. It is also testing a plan that would halve the price for some journals under a general review system, which could guide the papers for many titles.
OA advocates are happy that the publisher has found ways to provide open offer access to all authors, which it first committed in April. But they are worried about the price. Stephen Curry, a structural biologist at Imperial College London, says development is a “very significant” moment in the movement to make scientific articles free for all to read, but “it seems very expensive”.
This was changed by the ‘Plan S’ movement, in which funds are mandated that their work must be OA as soon as their grant recipients are published; Funding will usually cover the expenses of researchers in the journal to meet their needs. Last month, Springer signed a deal with Nature that allowed some German scientists to publish their articles in the Nature-branded journal for free, at a price of 9 9,500 per article. But today’s announcement reveals the options for any author who wants to publish OA. (Nature Editorially independent of its publisher.)
Publishers of highly selective journals, e.g. Nature And Science, Since the announcement of Plan S, has been making efforts on how to switch from the subscriptions to OA. A large portion of their production costs come from the evaluation of manuscripts which is ultimately rejected; While only revenue can be collected from some of the published articles, the fee per article is higher.
High price
No other journals charge as much as O 9,500 OA paper: Elsewhere the maximum fees are less than $ 6,000 (about € 5,000). Some OA advocates criticize Springer Nature’s fees for being too high. Peter Suber, director of Harvard Office Fees for Scholarly Communications in Cambridge, Massachusetts, said it was a “reputation tax” because it would pay for the journal’s high rejection rate, but, in his opinion, would not guarantee high quality or discovery. “I think it would be absurd to pay for any fund, university or author.” But Lisna Hinchleif, a librarian at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, says the fees for writers don’t have to be high. “I think a lot of writers would consider this an acceptable price for value,” he says.
Juan Pablo Alperin, a communications scholar at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, says that despite indications that the ad is “universally open access is inevitable,” the costs are beyond the reach of researchers in poorer countries.
A Springer Nature spokesman responded that the cost is higher than other titles because Nature-Branded Journal reviews many more papers than it publishes, and because they employ in-house editors and press executives whose work is of “huge value” to researchers. Of. It’s hard to compare, he says, because no other highly selective journal portfolio has an OA on this scale. The spokesman notes that O.A. Non-selected authors may continue to freely publish their research behind Pay-W research, the spokesperson notes: these papers are available to subscribers, and authors may make their accepted manuscripts available online after a delay; For Nature That’s six months after release.
The funding group that supports Plan S, called Coalition S, says how it relates to the services provided by publishers. Coalition coordinator Robert Kyle, head of open research at London-based biomedical-research fund Wellcome, says: “Once this information is available, the research community will be better placed to determine if the fees charged by publishers are fair and reasonable. .
‘Guided’ OA pilot
Springer Nature is also introducing a plan that will roughly reduce OA fees for some journals, with the help of which all three Nature Physics, Heredity in nature And Methods of nature. Guided O.A. Authors submit manuscripts under a scheme known as – and – if they pass the qualifying screen – pay a non-refundable fee of 2, 1,190 to cover the editorial assessment and peer-review process. In return, they receive a review document, which the publisher says includes a more detailed editorial evaluation than the general review reports, and are told which Springer Nature title is recommended for their work.
Submitting authors Nature Physics, For example, it will be accepted in the journal or stated what research they need to do to reach it; They can guide in low-choice journals Nature Communications Or Communications Physics; Or their manuscript may be rejected. They can then go away with their report or, if accepted, pay a top fee of 2,600 for publication. Nature Physics Or Nature Communications. The total fee of 4,790 is half of the standard OA fee Nature Physics, And a slight increase in the cost of publication Nature Communications, The only nature-branded title that is already fully OA. The top fee is 800 Communications Physics, Again it slightly increased the total cost to the current price in the OA journal; The publisher says this journal covers additional editorial work associated with the guided OA route rather than direct submissions.
The mechanism “saves costs more evenly than multiple authors” and will save time by avoiding multiple rounds of review in different journals, says James Butcher, vice president of Nature Portfolio and BMC’s journal, which owns Springer Nature. Hinchleef sees it as a “creative experiment for writers and publishers to manage financial risk.”
The plan could attract researchers hoping to publish it in a nature-branded journal, Alparin says. Compared to the full-price OA option, it “offers an initial barrier to entry with a higher threshold of success,” he says. But peer reviewers who evaluate manuscripts under this scheme feel that if a reviewed paper is not eventually published, nature’s title “essentially sells their free labor to authors,” says Curry.
Test run
Kille will look at the idea with interest. “Ultimately, we believe that publishing costs need to be split so that they reflect the different services provided by publishers, and this experiment. [Springer Nature] “This approach will help inform,” he says.
Nature is committed to increasing their OA content over time through the Family Journal, so most Plan S Funders have stated that despite their general reluctance to support hybrid journals (which keep some papers behind the papyrus and expose others), they are paying their OA fees. Will pay. . But some, including the European Commission and the Dutch Research Council (NWO), have yet to agree.
Other publishers of high-choice journals include Plan S. Cell Press (owned by Elsevier in Amsterdam) did not announce the policies in response, the journal said. Cell Its approach has been finalized, it is currently offered OA publishing at A 5,900, but only to “appropriate agreements with the funding agency whose journal authors”. That policy does not suit Plan S, Kille says.
The American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C., the publisher of a science-branded journal, says it is still thinking about how to organize into Plan S, since 2013, allowing authors to post an accepted version of their article in the article. Rep online repository when their paper is published. But it does not satisfy Plan S funds, which ask that manuscripts be shared under an open license that allows anyone else to redistribute or adapt the work. ScienceThe policy does not currently allow this.
