The blogosphere is buzzing about Nature’s story last week: a few scientific publishers have been consulting with a professional PR hound about how to fight the open access movement. For a taste, see here, here, and here for a roundup.

Scientific American and the Washington Post have since chimed in.

It’s reignited the debate about open access, as seen in this really interesting discussion on the Daily Transcript, a blog by Alex Palazzo, a Harvard Medical School postdoc. What do you do if you really believe in open access and want to publish in OA journals, but are trying to get your career up and running and need publications in more big-name journals to prove yourself (get jobs, grants, recognition)?

One commenter posted something that has made me want to wade in a bit. One thing that seems to get lost in the debate sometimes is how much peer review costs to do and how much time, work (and thus money) goes into turning a manuscript into a well and concisely written paper with nice charts and figures. If scientists were perfect writers and expert at graphic design and layout, then maybe the cost of publishing will go down. But in the meantime, someone’s gotta pay for the articles and journals you read. If it’s not the libraries and subscribers, then is it much better to have authors pay? That money would presumably come out of grants, so that means that the funders (most often the federal government) would not only be paying for the research but also for the publication of the results of that research.