Nature Drops Its Paywall... But Replaces It With Insane, Anti-Research Proprietary DRM | Techdirt

"We've written plenty about open access and how the big scientific journals profit off of publicly funded research by putting it behind a paywall, thereby greatly limiting the ability of knowledge (often paid for with our tax dollars) to be used to further discovery, research and innovation. The impact on society is tremendous, and unfortunate. In the science realm, there are two 'big' journal publishers: Nature and Science. If you're an academic releasing a scientific paper, those tend to be the two journals you most want your papers to appear in. So, it seemed like good news when Nature claimed it was moving away from a paywall and going to allow open access to the research papers it publishes. But the details suggest that whoever came up with this plan did it for the stupidest of reasons. Nature's own report on this change of plans kicks off by highlighting how ridiculously limited and encumbered with DRM this new offering will be ... The full press release notes that it's not that everything will be 'free to read' but rather that those who do subscribe will be able to freely 'share' the works (in this annoying, limited, proprietary DRM manner). Also '100 media outlets and blogs' will be given access as well, so that they can also share the works in this annoying, limited proprietary way ...Is this more open than the full paywall? Sure. But, it's such a hamfisted way of "opening up" that it makes things even more annoying. If you can't download, copy or print the text -- and you have to install annoying proprietary software -- it makes it a hell of a lot harder for researchers to actually make use of the text to, you know, contribute to their own research. Of course, the announcement also notes that Nature's owner, Macmillan, just happens to have a 'majority investment' in ReadCube, the proprietary DRM platform that the company is using.   In other words, this has little to do with true open access. Instead, it's a rather cynical attempt to pretend to be open access, while trying to pump up its own investment in some crappy DRM system. So, sure, kudos for taking a layer off the top of the paywall, but this is hardly a revolutionary step. It still seems very much designed to make it as annoying and inconvenient as possible to actually share knowledge. I mean, this is the very same Nature that, just months ago, was trying to pressure researchers from universities that had open access policies to get those universities to waive those policies when seeking to get published in Nature..."