Nature moves the Frontiers of publication

"Every science student knows that agonising frustration of when you can’t read that paper you want; the one paper which sums up exactly what you want to say, the crux of your essay – it’s right there! You click on the link in jubilation, and then clang! The digital copyright gates slam shut right in front of you. Thankfully, Edinburgh University pays some hefty subscription fees to help us avoid encountering this too often, and there already exist a number of prominent open access libraries of journals like PubMed and PLoS which provide a substantial number of papers online for free and on-demand. There are increasing numbers of journals, however, which publish entirely online with no fee for access to anyone. The prestigious Nature Publishing Group (NPG) made headlines last week by buying controlling shares in one such publication, the Swiss magazine Frontiers. The move surprised many as Frontiers, at first glance, appears to be philosophically at odds with its counterpart: Nature charges its readers, while Frontiers asks contributors to pay for publication instead; peer reviewers for Nature are anonymous and highly scrutinising, accepting less than a tenth of submissions, whereas their counterparts at Frontiers are named and accept 80-90 per cent of submissions. So, is there a fundamental shift in the ‘nature’ of scientific publishing? ... But don’t think that switching to OA is an altruistic plight of the publishers in response to these pleas. OA journals have proved highly profitable, generating as much as $172m globally in 2012. They also make articles more visible leading to increased submissions and citations. The profit comes from payments from contributors (as withFrontiers) and subsidies from academic institutions, professional societies or even governments. As Peter Suber, director of the Harvard Open Access Project writes 'There’s a lot of room for creativity in finding ways to pay the costs of a peer-reviewed OA journal…and we’re far from having exhausted our cleverness and imagination.'

There is some opposition to OA becoming more widespread in science, but more often it is received positively and is not necessarily seen as a threat to traditional journals ..."