Neil Jacobs, New platform is positive sign for research - OPINION - Research Information

"News that one of the top scientific publishers, Nature Publishing Group (NPG), is to launch an open-access platform has been received well by researchers. NPG Scientific Reports joins PLoS ONE and other publications, repositories and archives in offering new ways for researchers to make their papers more visible and easier for others to read. I really welcome the move, and the accompanying statement from NPG, and hope that this should finally dispel any lingering concerns about open access and peer review, or the quality of such publications....NPG plans to offer authors the gold route to open access, whereby they pay a fee to have their work included in the publication once it has been accepted by a team of peer reviewers. It’s just one model for how open access can work economically – and more needs to be done by organisations like JISC to establish that the transition to this type of publishing benefits everyone from author through to publisher. At the moment JISC is working on a project to make things more straightforward for publishers who want to archive papers in institutional repositories...."