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Nature Neuroscience offers open access publishing for $11k per article

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31–40 of 213 posts

Re: Nature Neuroscience offers open access publishing for $11k per article

#32
post #9

What in the world? I have a hard time seeing this as anything but a racket, or possibly a legal maneuver to increase standing to sue Sci-Hub or something ("Look, we've offered free access already!") How much did Nature Neuroscience pay to produce these articles? Do they pay their editors? Their reviewers? The authors? Do they pay their typesetters? Do they offer their print journal for free? Do they have expensive co…

"Most journals already allow authors to distribute copies by request." Does anyone know how this works in practice ? I'd like to ask a few of my favorite researchers for a copy of their papers but I am a hobbyist and don't want to take their time and add to their likely overflowing inbox. BTW, "this is nuts" isn't a claim you can make if you don't know the answer to questions you posted. From their website: "an artic…

Agree with the others - find the email address and ask. Especially if the lead author is a student / post doc, they are usually very excited to help. Profs often have an overflowing inbox and might be more hit or miss.

Re: Nature Neuroscience offers open access publishing for $11k per article

#33
post #21

The article says "Our aim is to ensure that lack of funds is never a barrier to publishing with us." As in they will provide funding if someone can't afford it. Isn't this a really good thing? What is the average budget for an research project that ends up with an article published in this journal? Clinical trials are in the millions, and research grants are often 6 figures. I know people see this as rent seeking, bu…

Some smaller labs at my tier 1 research institution have their grad students TA (so the university pays their salary) because they don't have the ability to pay them the $30k salary. $11k for one paper is a meaningful amount of money, and other journals can publish for an order of magnitude less. It doesn't cost $11k to read a paper, send a few emails and do some typesetting. People pay for this kind of thing because…

I get that but also consider that people are free to publish in other journals.

Although it does make me uncomfortable that its a for-profit company, they only print 7-10 articles a month, so I can understand the financials mathematics of needing to make it this amount per article if they want to continue to have a full staff maintain the journal the way they want to run it. I am just grateful these articles are now open to the public for free.

Re: Nature Neuroscience offers open access publishing for $11k per article

#34
post #9

What in the world? I have a hard time seeing this as anything but a racket, or possibly a legal maneuver to increase standing to sue Sci-Hub or something ("Look, we've offered free access already!") How much did Nature Neuroscience pay to produce these articles? Do they pay their editors? Their reviewers? The authors? Do they pay their typesetters? Do they offer their print journal for free? Do they have expensive co…

"Most journals already allow authors to distribute copies by request." Does anyone know how this works in practice ? I'd like to ask a few of my favorite researchers for a copy of their papers but I am a hobbyist and don't want to take their time and add to their likely overflowing inbox. BTW, "this is nuts" isn't a claim you can make if you don't know the answer to questions you posted. From their website: "an artic…

As a hobbyist, I just email the author, thank them for their work, maybe ask a question about or comment on their work and ask if they have the specific paper I can't get. Nobody's ever said no and I've asked dozens if times in CS, linguistics and for some climate and geography stuff. Academics are pretty accessible and even willing to chat about their work as long as you're not a crank.

Re: Nature Neuroscience offers open access publishing for $11k per article

#35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Most journals already allow authors to distribute copies by request." Does anyone know how this works in practice ? I'd like to ask a few of my favorite researchers for a copy of their papers but I am a hobbyist and don't want to take their time and add to their likely overflowing inbox. BTW, "this is nuts" isn't a claim you can make if you don't know the answer to questions you posted. From their website: "an artic…

For a sample size of one, go ahead and ask them: https://twitter.com/hwitteman/status/1015049411276300289

how ironic that her blog post on how to access paywalled articles is currently "Access Denied"

https://holly.witteman.ca/index.php/2017/12/11/getting-acces...

Re: Nature Neuroscience offers open access publishing for $11k per article

#36
post #5

Who is the target audience here? And who exactly is paying for this? Researchers who care about open access can and do already upload their work to arxiv and/ or scihub in addition to publishing their work in formal venues.

Politicians who want to require open access journals for govt funded work? Researchers who need “gold plated name” journals for tenure?

Just speculation.

Re: Nature Neuroscience offers open access publishing for $11k per article

#37
post #23

I’ve worked on a couple NSF grants and I believe this cost could be covered by the grant. Whether the granting institution is okay with this I don’t know but if I had to guess they probably see an $11K spend to distribute the results of the research in a (the?) prestigious journal as reasonable. To me $11K seems pretty steep. But I might go for $5K to put Nature’s stamp on my work and have it open access.

If the deciding factor for publication becomes money rather than quality, I wonder how long Nature's prestige will endure?

Re: Nature Neuroscience offers open access publishing for $11k per article

#38
post #9

What in the world? I have a hard time seeing this as anything but a racket, or possibly a legal maneuver to increase standing to sue Sci-Hub or something ("Look, we've offered free access already!") How much did Nature Neuroscience pay to produce these articles? Do they pay their editors? Their reviewers? The authors? Do they pay their typesetters? Do they offer their print journal for free? Do they have expensive co…

"Most journals already allow authors to distribute copies by request." Does anyone know how this works in practice ? I'd like to ask a few of my favorite researchers for a copy of their papers but I am a hobbyist and don't want to take their time and add to their likely overflowing inbox. BTW, "this is nuts" isn't a claim you can make if you don't know the answer to questions you posted. From their website: "an artic…

[deleted]

Re: Nature Neuroscience offers open access publishing for $11k per article

#39
post #5

Who is the target audience here? And who exactly is paying for this? Researchers who care about open access can and do already upload their work to arxiv and/ or scihub in addition to publishing their work in formal venues.

Most of this work is grant-funded, so the publication fees usually also come out of the grants. Primary investigators are not usually paying this out of pocket. It's entirely so that you can have an item in your publication list or CV that says "Nature Neuroscience" on it, in your fight for a tenure-track promotion, or to get the next grant, or to get a grant renewed, etc. Especially in life sciences, peer review is an essential component, and name recognition of the journal is unfortunately valuable- for Nature/Cell/Science due to the high bar they have for novelty, compared to other respectable but not-top-tier journals like PLoS.

Re: Nature Neuroscience offers open access publishing for $11k per article

#40
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some smaller labs at my tier 1 research institution have their grad students TA (so the university pays their salary) because they don't have the ability to pay them the $30k salary. $11k for one paper is a meaningful amount of money, and other journals can publish for an order of magnitude less. It doesn't cost $11k to read a paper, send a few emails and do some typesetting. People pay for this kind of thing because…

I get that but also consider that people are free to publish in other journals. Although it does make me uncomfortable that its a for-profit company, they only print 7-10 articles a month, so I can understand the financials mathematics of needing to make it this amount per article if they want to continue to have a full staff maintain the journal the way they want to run it. I am just grateful these articles are now…

They can publish in other journals but at the expense of their career. Many publications at leading journals is your only real chance of making a career in academia - it matters more than actual impact because they're much easily measurable :)
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