A Scientific Publishing Giant Wants You to Pay Them for Rejecting Your Work
The world of scientific publishing is unravelling fast
Psst, keep it to yourself, but I’ve got a one-time, never-to-be-repeated deal to offer you: give me several thousand dollars and I will write an illogical, error-strewn rant about the deep flaws of your life’s work, in prose that was either written at midnight under the influence of a triple espresso or by a narcoleptic mountain goat.
Tempted? That’s literally what the Nature family of scientific journals have announced this year: should you aspire to publish an open-access paper in Nature Physics, Nature Methods or Nature Genetics, you have to pay them 2190 euros ($2650) upfront for the privilege of reviewing your paper. Just reviewing. Not publishing — oh no, that costs lots more money. Just reviewing. And an editorial suggestion about which journal in the Nature family your paper is best suited for, if any. So not only do you now get to pay for this abuse from the reviewers of your paper, you pay to be rejected too. What a bargain.
Some of you unfamiliar with the shell game that is academia may well be thinking “well, perhaps for that much money the reviewers will do a more professional job”. Ah, you wonderful optimist — the reviewers don’t get paid. They are time-poor, stressed, overstretched academics balancing research, teaching, and admin like the rest of us scientists. No, all that money will go directly to the publisher of the journal. The Nature people want to charge thousands of dollars for a service that is largely free. You know, like all good corporations do.
This frankly insane scheme is just one part of the Nature brand’s bold plans for a fully open-access future, which include charging you 9500 euros ($11,390) for publishing one paper as open access, readable by anyone without a subscription. Just one paper. Well, not charging you, charging your funders. Well, not your funders, as they are merely the conduit of money from elsewhere. No, the Nature family would like to charge charities or the taxpayer 9500 euros per paper.
But it’s worth remembering that every time you see this kind of ostensibly crazy decision, someone, somewhere took this decision, and they had a reason for doing so. Sometimes that reason is purely ideological; but often that reason has its roots in the unintended consequences of something playing out elsewhere. And in this case it is the desire to move all branded Nature-X journals to be purely open access.
Moving to fully open-access means they no longer have any income from subscriptions to those journals: the income is purely from the one-time open-access payments to publish each paper. That creates a sticky quandary. On the one hand, their high staffing levels, of professional editors, production offices, copyeditors, graphic designers, and the whole newsroom staff at the flagship Nature journal itself, means they have huge costs to cover. On the other, they are very selective, each Nature-brand journal typically publishing around 5 to 15 percent of the papers it receives. Which means Nature-brand journals can only generate income on a tiny minority of the papers they have to handle.
So as Nature’s publisher your choices were likely either:
[A] charge much more than the already screamingly high 9500 euros per paper, or
[B] charge for reviewing papers to manage demand, and generate income proportional to your workload, or
[C] fire a bunch of your staff.
Which would you pick?
Perhaps option [D]: don’t go fully open-access. But this is where the unintended consequences come in. This latest piece of open-access shenanigans has been brought to you courtesy of Plan S, the bold European proposal to ensure that all papers from grant-funded research are immediately available open access in the journals. Plan S mandates all journals become fully open-access; the journals comply, and we get — charging thousands for a review.
(This whole saga is another indication that The Good Place was right: the world is so ridiculously interconnected that any well-intentioned action, no matter how noble, has unfortunate, even bad, consequences elsewhere.)
Plan S is brave, ambitious, and always going to cause problems. We know this because the UK has had a version of Plan S since 2013, under which all research funded by grants from any of our seven Research Councils should be published as open access if at all possible. And that solved precisely nothing. Instead, the amount of money spent on open-access by the UK funding bodies is insane. In 2018–2019 it was £24 million. And the prices journals charge for open-access publishing have gone through the roof: a range of Frontiers journals upped their prices by 45 times the rate of (Swiss) inflation last year.
We await details from many other major publishers of how exactly they will shift their business model to deal with Plan S. But they all face a version of the same quandaries as the Nature journals, of how to cover costs from a one-time payment for each paper, so the outlook is not good, for them or for us, the poor scientists who have to deal with their cock-eyed plans and prices.
Plan S may paradoxically be its own downfall. By forcing all journals to charge the insane amounts per paper currently being charged by the purely open-access journals, the 5000-euros or more of Nature Communications or Science Advances, it will make stark to everyone just how much money publishing companies leech from science, from the charities and taxpayers that fund most university-based science. Plan S may instead make the push for alternatives to the old journals grow louder, bolder, stronger. Most of the alternatives are already in play.
The pre-print revolution is in full swing. Much of the COVID-19 research that you’ve seen and heard across the media, that governments have based policy on, that companies have based vaccines on, has all come from pre-prints, scientific papers uploaded to a central server before publication. To some, this proves that we don’t need journals to be the arbiter of science, that we can each make our own choice about what is worthwhile to read and pursue further. But others see an essential role for journals, as both a filter for the massive floating island of garbage science that’s out there, and as a way to get peer review as a first-pass sanity check on what you’re reading.
A best-of-both worlds option are so-called overlay journals, journals that simply provide a service to peer review and collect together pre-prints hosted elsewhere. Sir Tim Gowers led the charge by founding the pure maths journal “Discrete Analysis”; neuroscience has one in the shape of Neurons, Behaviour, Data analysis & Theory. These seem a wonderful panacea, but have yet to take off in a big way. One sticking point is that of the preprint servers only arXiv supports such overlay journals. A more major one is that these journals face the same issue of all new journals: the prestige attached to a journal’s name is a major currency in science, and brand-new journals have no prestige, so struggle to attract papers.
Another option, and one long been argued for the UK, is to let journals keep their subscriptions, but let all authors immediately and freely share their final version of the paper — the one before the journal added all its fluff to it. This “green” access version lets journals do what they do well, and yet lets readers read everything for free. Some publishers don’t like this as they believe it makes their role rather meaningless; but actually they still serve a vital role of making the papers visible — finding these “green” access papers can be really tough, or impossible if the authors never bother to share them, or where do they share them cannot be indexed by Google.
All strong alternatives to making all journals open-access, all with their own flaws, flaws that I’d wager Plan S will provide the impetus to solve.
There’s a final irony in the Nature family’s plans. A noble aim of Plan S is to diversify access to science, to allow anyone in any country (that can access the internet) to read published science. To remove the barriers to knowledge, and let the brightest minds around the world build the edifice of science irrespective of where those minds are. Indeed, Nature’s own editorial line often talks about the need for diversity in science and in the papers it publishes. But these insane prices for reviewing and publishing a single paper means that publishing in these Nature-brand journals will be reduced to the comparative handful of labs and institutions that have the grants to pay these prices. In attempting to make the research they publish open to the world, the Nature-brand journals are dramatically narrowing what parts of the world can publish with them.
Twitter: @markdhumphries
