Nature’s announcement of a new journal has been exciting comment this week, mainly because the new publication will feature an open access route.

Nature Communications will be the first online-only Nature-branded journal, but it is the ability of scientists to pay an ‘article processing charge’ to make their papers open access that has generated most interest.

As Steven Inchcoombe, Nature Publishing Group’s managing director, explained to The Scientist:

Few could have anticipated the scale of upheaval in the global economy over the past twelve months. At the same time, scholarly publishing is on the cusp of yet more radical change with increasing commitment by research funders to cover the costs of open access making experimentation with new business models more viable.

The new journal aims to publish papers in biological, chemical and physical sciences that “represent advances of significant interest to specialists within each field”.

Not everyone is impressed by the NPG announcement though.

On the Science Insider blog, Patrick Brown comments thus:

After brilliant and courageous editors and staff at PLoS had the cojones and vision to make high-quality, truly open-access scientific publication affordable and accessible to any scientist with a constructive contribution to communicate, and in doing so, prove the cynics at Science and Nature wrong, it’s deliciously ironic to see the craven NPG, years later, skulking around the open-access world looking for a way to pick up a few bucks.

Nature Communications starts accepting submissions in October 2009, with a first issue scheduled to go online in April 2010.