Nature’s Beggar Access - Ross Mounce

" ... After this announcement, the situation won’t change much. The printable-PDF that most people use and want is still under a 6 month embargo. It can’t be posted to an institutional repository. The scholarly poor, without a Nature subscription, will still need to beg subscribers for access to specific articles they want. Only now this begging is more clearly legalised. Nature will graciously, formally allow privileged subscribers to share an extremely rights-restricted locked-down view of Nature articles with their scholarly poor friends. These view-only articles CANNOT be printed, presumably because that would enable untrackable ‘offline’ sharing of research. Which makes me think? What are the real reasons behind this new policy? Macmillan Publishers Ltd who publish Nature, also run Digital Science who are an investor of Altmetric.com AND an investor in ReadCube. It’s clear that this new policy is major PR for ReadCube – the links will presumably direct to Nature articles view-only within ReadCube. The more subtle boost is also for Altmetric.com & the altmetrics of all shared Nature articles. If this PR stunt converts some dark social sharing of PDFs into public, trackable, traceable sharing of research via non-dark social means (e.g. Twitter, Facebook, Google+ …) this will increase the altmetrics of Nature relative to other journals and that may in-turn be something that benefits Altmetric.com   I’m sorry to be so cynical about this PR stunt, but it really doesn’t appear to change much. It will convert a small amount of semi-legal ‘dark social’ sharing, into formally legal public social sharing of research. It has legalised begging. It also panders to those that think true open access publishing is 'a solution for a problem that does not exis'. A shrewd measure retarding the progress towards the inevitability of open access.   Congratulations Nature, hmmm…? ..."