Comment by alasdair_ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by alasdair_ | Hacker News Reader

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This seems like it would be fixable with a fairly small amount of money, relatively speaking: offer something like $250K for the most important papers that would otherwise be published in Nature to instead be published in an open-access journal. After all of the major papers for several months are published in open access journals and the most well-known journals are reduced to publishing only the dregs that are left, opinion could change quite quickly. Sustain this type of payment for a couple of years and I'd bet there would be a sizable number of other people publishing open-access, since to be published in Nature would imply that your paper wan't important enough to be offered the $250K reward.

(Disclaimer: I used to work in this field at biomedcentral.com)

Or just make Science OA. Unlike Nature and Cell, it's published by a non-profit (the American Association for the Advancement of Science). In principle, the American government could just give them money to make everything freely accessible. Or the publishers could ask authors to pay publication fees with waivers for those unable to pay, like most OA journals. Since the goal of the AAAS is (at least theoretically) to publish papers and not to make a profit, the fees need not be much higher than other OA journals. Given the average Science paper probably costs something like $1 million to produce, I doubt the authors would balk at paying a few thousand to make their work accessible to everyone.

If you had any kind of realistic measure to identify "important papers that would otherwise be published in Nature" then the problem would be already solved, since all the evaluation criteria could look at that instead of the journal ratings. However, we do not - currently the only actually usable way to identify "important papers that would otherwise be published in Nature" is simply asking "has this research been published in Nature?"

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