Nautilus
Nature Materials on access to the literature
Joerg Heber, a senior editor at Nature Materials, announces that access to all Editorials in the journal is now free to registered users of nature.com. This follows a similar decision taken at Nature some years ago, and more recently, by Nature Cell Biology. The August Editorial of Nature Materials (8, 611; 2009) discusses publishing models more broadly: “As moves towards open-access schemes gain momentum, the choice between ‘author pays’ and subscription-based models may come down to fundamental business considerations rather than limits in access to original research.” In ‘open access’ publishing, authors pay for publication costs, and online access and dissemination of those papers is free for readers.