Nature diaries reveal the terms of the referral open access option

Publisher Springer Nature announced how scientists can make their articles in the most selective titles to read for free as soon as they are published, part of a long-awaited move to offer open access publications in the Nature family of journals.

From 2021, the publisher will charge € 9,500, US $ 11,390 or £ 8,290 to make a paper open access (OA) in Nature and 32 other magazines that currently keep most of their articles behind paywalls and are funded by subscriptions. It is also experimenting with a scheme that would halve that price for some journals, based on a common review system that could guide articles to a series of titles.

Supporters of OA are delighted that the publisher has found a way to offer open access to all authors, which it first committed to in April. But they are worried about the price. The development is a “very significant” moment in the movement to make science articles free for everyone to read, but it “seems very expensive,” says Stephen Curry, a structural biologist at Imperial College London.

The change was spurred by the “Plan S” movement, in which funders require grant recipients to make their work OA as soon as it is published; funders will generally cover researchers’ costs for this in journals that meet their needs. Last month, Springer Nature signed an agreement that allowed German scientists to publish openly in Nature-branded journals for free, with a price tag of € 9,500 per article in their institutions’ subscription fees. But today’s announcement reveals options for any author wishing to post OA. (Nature is editorially independent of its publisher.)

Extremely selective magazine editors, such as Nature is Science, have been trying to figure out how to switch from subscriptions to OA since Plan S was announced. Much of their production costs come from evaluating manuscripts that are ultimately rejected; when revenue can only be collected from the few articles that are published, the per-article rate is high.

High price

No other newspaper charges up to € 9,500 per OA newspaper – the highest fees elsewhere are less than $ 6,000 (about € 5,000). Some supporters of OA criticize Springer Nature’s compensation as too high. Peter Suber, director of the Harvard Office for Scholarly Communication in Cambridge, Massachusetts, says this is a “prestige tax” because it will pay for the high rejection rates of the journals but, in his opinion, will not guarantee higher quality or detectability. “I think it would be absurd for any lender, university or author to pay for it,” he says. But Lisa Hinchliffe, a librarian at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, says the rates aren’t necessarily too high for authors. “I think many authors will find this an acceptable price for the value,” he says.

Juan Pablo Alperin, a communications scholar at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, says that although the announcement “signals universal open access is inevitable,” the costs are out of reach for researchers in poorer countries.

A spokesperson for Springer Nature replies that costs are higher than other titles because Nature-branded journals review far more articles than published, and because they employ in-house editors and press officers, whose work is of “enormous value” to researchers. “Comparing is difficult, as no other highly selective magazine portfolio offers OA on this scale,” they say. Authors who do not choose OA can continue to freely publish their research behind a paywall, notes the spokesperson: these documents are available to subscribers and authors can make their accepted manuscripts available online after a delay; for Nature that is, six months after publication.

The group of funders who support Plan S, called cOAlition S, say publishers should provide data to break down how publication rates relate to services provided. “Once this information is available, the research community will be in a better position to decide whether the rates being collected by publishers are fair and reasonable,” says coalition coordinator Robert Kiley, who is also head of open research at the funder of Wellcome biomedical research in London.

“Guided” OA pilot

Springer Nature is also introducing a scheme that would roughly halve OA rates for some journals, which it is experimenting with. Physics of nature, Nature Genetics is Methods of nature. Under the program, called Guided OA, authors submit manuscripts and, if they pass an eligibility screening, pay a non-refundable fee of € 2,190 to cover an editorial evaluation and peer review process. In return, they receive a review paper, which the publisher says includes a more detailed editorial assessment than typical review reports, and are told which title Springer Nature their work is recommended for.

Authors who submit to Physics of nature, for example, he might be accepted into that journal or told what reviews they need to do to achieve it; they could be guided to the less selective journals Nature Communications or Communications physics; or their manuscript may be rejected. They can then withdraw with their report or, if accepted, pay a € 2,600 reload fee to publish it Physics of nature or Nature Communications. The total fee of € 4,790 is half the standard rate for OA Physics of natureand a slight increase in the publication price in Nature Communications, the only Nature-branded title that is already fully OA. The top-up fee is € 800 per Communications physics, again making the total cost a slight increase from the current price in that OA newspaper; the increase is to cover the extra editorial work involved in the guided OA journey versus direct submissions to these journals, the publisher says.

This mechanism “shares the cost more evenly among multiple authors,” and will save time by avoiding multiple review cycles in different journals, says James Butcher, vice president of journals at Portfolio Nature and BMC, a Springer Nature proprietary imprint. Hinchliffe sees it as “a creative experiment for authors and publishers to manage financial risk”.

The scheme may be tempting to researchers hoping to publish in a Nature-branded journal, Alperin says. Compared to the full-priced OA option, “it offers a lower initial barrier to entry with a higher success threshold,” he says. But peer reviewers who rated the manuscript under this scheme may assume that Nature’s titles are “essentially selling their free work to the authors” if a reviewed article is ultimately not published, Curry says.

Test

Kiley will view the idea with interest. “Ultimately, we believe that publishing costs should be split to reflect the different services provided by publishers and this experiment of [Springer Nature] it will help inform this approach, “he says.

Magazines in nature the family has pledged to increase their OA content over time, so most Plan S backers have said they will pay OA fees, despite a general reluctance to support hybrid journals (which keep some documents behind a paywall and make others open). But some, including the European Commission and the Dutch Research Council (NWO), have not yet accepted this.

Other highly selective journal editors have not yet announced policies in response to Plan S. Cell Press (owned by Elsevier in Amsterdam) says the journal Cell is finalizing its approach: it currently offers the OA publication for $ 5,900, but only to authors whose funding agency “has an appropriate deal” with the journal. That policy doesn’t fit with Plan S, says Kiley.

The publisher of the Science-branded journals, the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington DC, says it is still thinking about how to comply with Plan S. Since 2013, it has allowed authors to publish an accepted version of their article in an online archive when their article is published. But that doesn’t satisfy Plan S funders, who are demanding that the manuscripts be shared under an open license that allows anyone else to redistribute or adapt the work. ScienceThe current policy does not allow this.