Thoughts (three different ones) on Nature‘s €9,500 article-processing charge

I’m late to this party, but I want to say a few things about the recently announced €9,500 article-processing charge (APC) that Nature has introduced to make itself Plan-S compliant.

The first thing is that a lot of people are quite understandably outraged by this very large fee.

Good. They should be outraged. The APIC is outrageous.

But here’s the thing: we should all have been outraged at Nature‘s cost long, long ago. Becuase the €9,500 figure wasn’t pulled out of thin air. It’s the amount Springer Nature needs to charge to maintain its revenue at the same level. Which means we are already paying €9,500 for each Nature article, but not noticing because that cost is spread across many subscriptions.

Let me say this another way: for each article that is published in Nature, €9,500 leaves the scholarly community. (I might mention here in passing the profit margins at the big scholarly publishers are all around 35%, so it’s likely that upwards of €3,000 of that is pure profit.)

That’s why I welcome the outrage. It’s the sound of academics finally waking up and realising that they are being had. It’s several decades too late, but we can’t worry about that.

Second thing: almost all the scientific value of a paper published in Nature, over that of the manuscript before it went to that venue, is in peer-review.

Peer-review that we do. Because publishers do not provide peer-review. We do.

We have all swallowed the idea that we ought to provide professional peer-review services to publishers for free because that’s part of being in the scholarly community. When I am reviewing for a diamond OA journal (zero APC) such as Acta Palaeontologica Polonica, or a low-APC journal like PeerJ, I think that’s perfectly reasonable. But when it’s for a journal that is going to turn around and charge the author €9,500 for services that you and I provided, that is not reasonable.

And this is why, while I have grave reservations about the idea of introducing financial incentives into peer-review, I am intrigued by The 450 Movement, in which James Heathers argues that peer-reviewers should be paid $450 per review, and provides a sample contract that reviewers can send to publishers who ask them provide this service.

(And again, remember this was happening before Nature announced the APC, when they were subscription only. Back then, too, they were taking €9,500 per paper based on work that you did for them, for free.)

Third thing: the way to fix this is to stop feeding the beast.

How did we get into the situation where we consider it normal to give our work to journals that get €9,500 from it, and then contribute free professional services to help the journal create a versions of our colleagues’ work that the journals can claim copyright on?

It’s strange, isn’t it? I guess we’re boiled frogs. There was a time when Nature was just a regular journal, and placing a short paper in it was not much different from placing it elsewhere. But somehow it started to be seen as prestigious, and from there a runaway process quickly made things more and more extreme (as with runaway sexual selection). People saw a Nature paper as prestigious, so more people submitted there, so a greater proportion of submissions were rejected, so Nature came to be seen as even more more prestigious. Vamp till insane.

Because this is insane. It can’t be said too often (or, apparently, often enough even), that papers don’t get into Nature by being good science — rigorously argued, well supported, statistically sound. They get in by proposing an exciting hypothesis, or by featuring a spectacular specimen, or by finding a surprising result (often based on flimsy statistical evidence: impact factor has no correlation with statistical strength, so more prestigious journals do not have more strongly supported results.)

And worse, a given study in its Nature form is objectively less useful than the same study would be in a regular journal: it’s sliced and compressed to fit length limits that make no sense, especially for descriptive work.

So why do people expend so much energy trying to get their papers into Nature (and Science, which is just as bad)? Because people believe, rightly or wrongly, that their careers depend on publishing in these specific journals.

Do we have any idea how insane that sounds to people outside of the academic bubble?

“I discovered, documented and published on a completely novel evolutionary mechanism!”

“Oh, that must be great for your career.”

“Not really. I couldn’t get a compressed three-page version of it into Nature, so I had to publish a full-length, rigorously argued, extensively evidenced, lavishly illustrated version in PLOS ONE instead.”

If we want a rational scientific ecosystem, it’s imperative that we stop judging work by what journal it appears in, and judge it only by its own merits.

“But Mike, we don’t have time to actually read an author’s papers”. Oh, you’re telling me you don’t have time to do your job? Then you need to make changes.

“But Mike, it’s not that simple”. Yes, it is. It really is. If you judge a paper by the journal it appears in, you are scientifically illiterate. And you are encouraging all sorts of harmful behaviour that actively cripples the progress of science. People who are desperate to get a paper into Nature? At best, they cripple its scientific usefulness by cutting out crucial material, relegating a bare-bones (i.e. irreproducible) version methods section to footnotes, squashing illustrations together and shrinking them down to postage-stamp size. That’s if everything goes to plan. At worst, they cherry-pick the best results from experiments, or straight-up fabricate results. And either way, effort is wasted on getting into a specific journal that would otherwise be spent doing actual science.

Folks, we have to be better than this.

We just have to.