[_yb2s]

All NIH funded research is freely open access by law.

In this case it seems the authors didn’t pay the (crazy expensive) Nature open access fee. They will have to upload a free PDF to PubMed manually, but have up to a year to do so, and don’t seem to have done it yet.

[Aeolun]

Is Nature’s open access fee really that crazy? Last time I checked it was a few thousand dollars.

And it’s paid once, to make the whole thing open perpetually. It certainly seems better than having the people interested in reading it pay $30-40 each.

Of course, this is also based on the few times I’ve heard researchers talk about the ways they could spend their grant money. $2k to Nature sounds like a great deal by comparison.

Note: Worked for Nature in the past.

[_yb2s]

It’s over $12k, which seems insane, and is 5-10x what other journals charge.

These journals are a racket… volunteer editors, volunteer reviewers, and thousands for what amounts to PDF hosting… which they also charge every school and library in the world on the other end.

[hx8]

Yes, I wouldn't expect someone to pay a few thousand dollars to Nature when PubMed will do the same job for free. I think the role of academic journals is decreasing as open and tech-savvy solutions to information sharing and screening are being deployed.

[Aeolun]

Depends, PubMed will happily take any article. I know for a fact that Nature does it’s own independent review of whatever is published (or did, years ago anyway). It’s not a guarantee of course, there’s been enough instances of review failure even in Nature, but it’s not the same as free access.

Ultimately what you are paying for is curation.