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Note: Are we sure this is a mandatory charge or just the charge if the authors must publish an immediate open access article. I just published in Nature Metabol

Note: Are we sure this is a mandatory charge or just the charge if the authors must publish an immediate open access article. I just published in Nature Metabolism and there was no charge at all. The quality of the review and editing was EXTRAORDINARY! I wanted to thank all of the reviewers for doing a superb job. Had I required immediate open access then it would have cost! But with both full versions in bioRxiv and Pubmed Central, I felt access was essentially complete.

kragen 5y ago
Were the reviewers paid?
- rvnx 5y ago
  To me it sounds absurd to have to pay reviewers, when you have nothing guaranteed in return. If the publication would give insurance "we pay back 10'000 USD to the buyer of the paper in case we did a mistake because that's our guarantee of quality", then yes, but here, nothing guarantees you the quality / result, only that they tried to do reasonable efforts to somehow review and exfiltrate some of the most obviouses scams.
  - kragen 5y ago
    I'm just thinking that if Nature didn't pay the reviewers (and I agree it is very unlikely that they did) then the quality of the reviewing probably is not a result of money flowing into Nature, whether from the authors or from the readers.
  - diffeomorphism 5y ago
    Reviewers are selected not picked out of a hat.... > ... we pay 10000 in case of a mistake ... Now please apply the same standard to software. > reasonable effort for many hours/days/weeks. Otherwise known as "work". Why is it absurd to pay for work?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- meling 5y ago
  As an academic (unrelated to this journal and field), I’ve more or less stopped accepting to review papers because of the low reward… that is, there are virtually no incentives to me as a professor to do this and it takes a lot of time to do proper reviews. I have better things to do with my time. I attended an ACM webinar some years ago on the topic of open access, and while the OA fees weren’t as high as this one, I asked how they could defend these fees… the answers weren’t entirely satisfactory to me — in general they claimed obviously admin costs, but also that such funds were used to support other well-meaning things ACM deals with such as scholarships/workshops etc for young and female researchers among other things… Personally, while these are good things for ACM to support, I dislike the somewhat arbitrary connection to OA publishing… PS: I’m not sure if this is still their policy.
  - kragen 5y ago
    I think the ACM should support young and female researchers by making all their papers open access, publicly endorsing Sci-hub, and committing to send Sci-hub some money every month. That would have a much bigger impact than scholarships and workshops.
    - mnd999 5y ago
      I mean sure, making papers by underrepresented groups open access to increase their reach is actually a nice idea. Not sure what this has to do with sci-hub though, publishers are not going to fund sci-hub in the same way that the RIAA is not going to fund the pirate bay.
      - kragen 5y ago
        I don't mean they should make papers by underrepresented groups open access. I mean they should make the papers researchers need to read open access so that access to those papers isn't conditional on getting into a rich university, thus reducing the barriers to underrepresented groups and everyone else. By "their papers" I meant "the ACM's papers", not "the papers of young and female researchers". It's extremely unfortunate that the ACM has been degraded into being a "publisher" rather than a learned society, and I agree that as long as they think of themselves that way, they will continue to obstruct progress and reproduce patterns of social and economic inequality in the way they are currently doing.
- ta988 5y ago
  Never. I've reviewed for over 30 journals from low to high quality and you don't get a dime. And sometimes get the editor hinting you what they want you to say.
  - kragen 5y ago
    I'm thinking that if Nature didn't pay the reviewers then the quality of the reviewing probably is not a result of money flowing into Nature, whether from the authors or from the readers?
    - ta988 5y ago
      You have some incentives to review. In the US they are a factor to get visas and green cards. They are used for getting tenure in some places. It is also a way to get in the "club" because now the editor that revuews grants nows your name...
      - kragen 5y ago
        I didn't mean to say that no incentives exist. I meant to say that those incentives wouldn't get stronger if authors or readers sent more money to Nature.
cossatot 5y ago
This is just for open access, not for publication. I haven't published with Nature since it was owned by Macmillan (rather than Springer Nature, the current owner) and I think the publication fees were ~$1500. My experience was that the editor and reviewers were more focused on the impact of the work rather than the technical quality. It was all about whether the work was Nature-level status; there were no changes to any of the analysis or the body of the paper, just the intro and conclusions. It felt slimy so I decided to only publish in non-profit society journals from then on.

kragen 5y ago

Were the reviewers paid?

rvnx 5y ago
To me it sounds absurd to have to pay reviewers, when you have nothing guaranteed in return. If the publication would give insurance "we pay back 10'000 USD to the buyer of the paper in case we did a mistake because that's our guarantee of quality", then yes, but here, nothing guarantees you the quality / result, only that they tried to do reasonable efforts to somehow review and exfiltrate some of the most obviouses scams.
- kragen 5y ago
  I'm just thinking that if Nature didn't pay the reviewers (and I agree it is very unlikely that they did) then the quality of the reviewing probably is not a result of money flowing into Nature, whether from the authors or from the readers.
- diffeomorphism 5y ago
  Reviewers are selected not picked out of a hat.... > ... we pay 10000 in case of a mistake ... Now please apply the same standard to software. > reasonable effort for many hours/days/weeks. Otherwise known as "work". Why is it absurd to pay for work?
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
meling 5y ago
As an academic (unrelated to this journal and field), I’ve more or less stopped accepting to review papers because of the low reward… that is, there are virtually no incentives to me as a professor to do this and it takes a lot of time to do proper reviews. I have better things to do with my time. I attended an ACM webinar some years ago on the topic of open access, and while the OA fees weren’t as high as this one, I asked how they could defend these fees… the answers weren’t entirely satisfactory to me — in general they claimed obviously admin costs, but also that such funds were used to support other well-meaning things ACM deals with such as scholarships/workshops etc for young and female researchers among other things… Personally, while these are good things for ACM to support, I dislike the somewhat arbitrary connection to OA publishing… PS: I’m not sure if this is still their policy.
- kragen 5y ago
  I think the ACM should support young and female researchers by making all their papers open access, publicly endorsing Sci-hub, and committing to send Sci-hub some money every month. That would have a much bigger impact than scholarships and workshops.
  - mnd999 5y ago
    I mean sure, making papers by underrepresented groups open access to increase their reach is actually a nice idea. Not sure what this has to do with sci-hub though, publishers are not going to fund sci-hub in the same way that the RIAA is not going to fund the pirate bay.
    - kragen 5y ago
      I don't mean they should make papers by underrepresented groups open access. I mean they should make the papers researchers need to read open access so that access to those papers isn't conditional on getting into a rich university, thus reducing the barriers to underrepresented groups and everyone else. By "their papers" I meant "the ACM's papers", not "the papers of young and female researchers". It's extremely unfortunate that the ACM has been degraded into being a "publisher" rather than a learned society, and I agree that as long as they think of themselves that way, they will continue to obstruct progress and reproduce patterns of social and economic inequality in the way they are currently doing.
ta988 5y ago
Never. I've reviewed for over 30 journals from low to high quality and you don't get a dime. And sometimes get the editor hinting you what they want you to say.
- kragen 5y ago
  I'm thinking that if Nature didn't pay the reviewers then the quality of the reviewing probably is not a result of money flowing into Nature, whether from the authors or from the readers?
  - ta988 5y ago
    You have some incentives to review. In the US they are a factor to get visas and green cards. They are used for getting tenure in some places. It is also a way to get in the "club" because now the editor that revuews grants nows your name...
    - kragen 5y ago
      I didn't mean to say that no incentives exist. I meant to say that those incentives wouldn't get stronger if authors or readers sent more money to Nature.

cossatot 5y ago

This is just for open access, not for publication. I haven't published with Nature since it was owned by Macmillan (rather than Springer Nature, the current owner) and I think the publication fees were ~$1500. My experience was that the editor and reviewers were more focused on the impact of the work rather than the technical quality. It was all about whether the work was Nature-level status; there were no changes to any of the analysis or the body of the paper, just the intro and conclusions. It felt slimy so I decided to only publish in non-profit society journals from then on.