Nature Medicine | Spoonful of Medicine

Barking at the wrong tree

Time to return to the issue I brought up the other day regarding the open-access debate. Some people think that publishing firms rip people off by taking scientific information from the community and selling it back to the very providers of this information. This ignores, of course, that some journals such as the Nature titles, Science and the Cell Press stable add value to the content they publish by filtering scientific information in such a way that their imprimatur is (in most cases) guarantee of quality. Ironically, as these journals have professional editors, who are the public face of the titles, they tend to receive most of the negative feedback regarding our business model.

But, fine, let’s play along and ignore the fact that we at the Nature journals add value to what we publish. The purpose of this post is to illustrate that, even though we charge for our content, our publications are very cost-effective for our readers.

Take a look at this figure from an independent study by Credit Suisse/First Boston. It shows how much the University of California system (a very important user in terms of sheer volume) had to pay every time a member of their community used our journals online, and it compares this cost across different publishing companies.

costs-w.JPG

As you can see, whereas the cost of using our journals is approximately one nickel per use, other publisher’s products cost well over an order of magnitude more (almost two orders of magnitude in one case).

I’m sorry that I had to blank out the name of the other publishers; I didn’t feel comfortable fully disclosing them. In any case, I’m sure you suspect who they might be.

So, next time you think that the Nature journals rip you off, think about this graph. Do the Nature journals really deserve all the flak they receive, or do we actually give people their money’s worth?

Comments

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    Xavier Bosch said:

    Quality is certainly a critical issue in the open-access debate. Indeed, there are those who argue, perhaps too radically, that we are inundated by information but lack the time to evaluate it and that open-access worsens this situation by opening the gates to increasing amounts of unfiltered information. There are also concerns about whether reputational incentives will be sufficient to ensure quality maintenance in open-access journals. Yet if a journal does not have a reputation for high quality (reflected in part by the citations it receives), less people will read it and less would-be authors will wish to publish in it.

    Did you know that open-access for-profit publisher BioMed Central is now allowing groups of researchers to start new open-access journals from scratch or convert existing journals to open-access? Editorial control remains with the researchers and the company provides them with a free publishing system (https://www.biomedcentral.com/independent/). Is it right to take such a risk or is it better to rely upon skilled editors, as it has been the case so far? While it is fair to say that the open-access movement has helped to widen the publications spectrum, with a great quantity of new journals having been created, only time will tell whether the quality of what is published in these new journals will be good enough.

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    Sergio Stagnaro MD said:

    Under certain situation, the otherwise necessary filtering authors’s papers results of greatest responsability, as well as difficulty to realize. For instance, if an outstanding,original,author, even renowned around scientific world due to his intellectual honesthy, should state in an his articles that in all biological systems there is non local realm, beside the local one,of course,explaining the real reasons related to entanglement and dis-entanglement phenomena, so that the stimulation of a single point of a biological apparatus (e.g., a kidney), “simoultaneously” stimulates all part of the same biological system, including urinary bladder and in men also the prostate, the paper’s acceptance will surely be expected as negative. Nothwithstanding, thanks to such as discovery, physicians can bedside recognize as healthy all components of the examined biological systems in only one second. On the other hand, in case of whatever disorder, precise diagnosis could be made at the bedside in a few seconds.