Nature's fauxpen access leaves me very sad and very angry. | petermr's blog

"Two days ago Nature/Macmillan (heareafter 'Nature') announced a new form of 'access' (or better 'barrier') to scientific scholarship - 'SciShare'. It's utterly unacceptable in several ways and Michael Eisen, Ross Mounce ('beggars-access') have castigated it; Glyn Moody gathers these and adds his own, always spot-on, analysis ... Please read Glyn (and Michael and Ross). I won't repeat their analyses.  TL;DR Macmillan have unilaterally 'made all articles free to view'. The scholarly poor have to find a rich academic and beg them for a DRM'ed copy of a paper. This copy: cannot be printed cannot be downloaded cannot be cut and pasted CANNOT BE READ BY BLIND PEOPLE OR VISUALLY IMPAIRED CANNOT BE READ BY MACHINES (i.e all semantics are destroyed) Cannot be read on mobile devices (which are common in the Global Soutrh) There are so many reasons why this is odious  - here are some more beyond Michael, Ross and Glyn... It announces, arrogantly, that Nature makes the rules for the scientific community. Publishers have a role (possibly) in the digital age in promoting communication, but Nature has now no role for me. It's now an analogue of Apple in telecoms - unaswerable to anyone (Macmillan is a private company). Like Apple, Nature now intends to sell its 'products' as a branded empire. (Recall that the authors write the papers, the reviewers review them, all for free. The taxpayer and the students pay Macmillan for the privilege of having this published. Earlier Nature said it costs about 20,000 USD to publish a paper - it costs arxiv 7 USD and Cameron Neylon's estimate is that it shoudl be about 400 +- 50 %. This huge figure is simply for branding - in the same way that people pay huge anounts for branded H2O+CO2.  Private empires are very very bad for a just society. It is deeply wrenchingly divisive ... t is highly likely to create incompatible platform-empires of the sort we see in mobile phones. ReadCube is a Digital Science company ... It destroys semantics. Simply, it says that if a sighted human can read it, that's good enough ..."