Scientific publishing: Changing Nature | The Economist

IN THE world of academic publishing, it is hard to get more traditional than Nature. The British scholarly weekly has been reporting scientific breakthroughs since 1869. It hews to the time-honoured, and time-consuming, process of peer review, in which papers' worth is judged by anonymous experts prior to publication. Fewer than one in ten submissions make the cut. Successful ones are printed on dead trees and dispatched by mail to subscribers, who pay for the privilege of reading about the latest important findings. Their authors win kudos just for getting their paper in. Contrast this with Frontiers. The Swiss publisher has been posting online papers since 2007. Its peer reviewers, whose names are known, accept 80-90% of submissions, rejecting only those which are fatally flawed. Authors of successful manuscripts pay a publication fee, ranging from $750 to $2,600, so that readers can have free access to articles. A paper's merit is gauged after publication, using assorted internet metrics like the number of downloads. For all the differences, the fates of Nature and Frontiers have become intertwined. On February 27th Nature Publishing Group (NPG), which owns Nature and 81 other scholarly journals, announced that it has bought a controlling stake in Frontiers for an undisclosed sum. Besides 30 titles in 14 scientific fields the Swiss upstart brings a social-networking platform—a LinkedIn for boffins, if you like—to share not just research, but news, job offers and information about conferences and events. It currently boasts around 80,000 members. This is not NPG's first foray into the new-fangled world of "science 2.0". It launched its first fully open-access journal, where end users pay nothing to read papers, in 2006. Now it has 16. Of the 12,900 scientific papers published by NPG journals in 2012, 2,300 were made available free. Steven Inchcoombe, NPG's boss, says that his company's open-access business is turning a profit. NPG's parent company, Macmillan Publishers, also owns Digital Science, which offers, among other things, web-based alternatives to traditional measures of impact like the citation index. The latest deal will bolster NPG's position. In 2012 Frontiers published more than 5,000 papers, making it the fifth-biggest open-access publisher. And the market is growing. This week BioMed Central, part of Springer, number one on the list, launched its 250th periodical, catchily titled the Journal of Venomous Animals and Toxins Including Infectious Diseases. A few days earlier BioMed Central published its 150,000th paper since it was founded in 2000. Outsell, a consultancy, estimates that open-access journals generated $172m in 2012, up 34% from 2011.