https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-05433-9
The journal, to me, does not seem to be much trustworthy:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nature_Communications
"Starting October 2014, the journal only accepted submissions from authors willing to pay an article processing charge (currently $5,200 in the United States)"
"It covers the natural sciences, including physics, chemistry, Earth sciences, and biology."
I can't agree. If you keep reading the Wikipedia article, you'll note: In January 2016, all content became freely accessible to the public.
It was previously edited by Magdalena Skipper, who has an impeccable track record and who is now the editor-in-chief of Nature. It has an impact factor of 12.
What does that change? It seems it earns by taking $5,200 for "processing charges" from every submitter and additionally seems not to be specialized for some specific discipline. But maybe taking these charges is actually seen as a way forward for the publishers.
It's the most expensive of the Nature Research open access journals:
https://www.nature.com/openresearch/publishing-with-npg/natu...
> It has an impact factor of 12
I haven't understood that, thanks. In this ranking it's on 184-th place, compared to the real "Nature" which is on 25-th:
https://www.scimagojr.com/journalrank.php?page=4
According to this page, there are 213 journals with IF > 10, out of total cca 12,000, which can fit the previous position:
http://mdanderson.libanswers.com/faq/26159
At least it's on the 16-th in the category of the "open access journals":
https://www.scimagojr.com/journalrank.php?openaccess=true
Still, it is still somewhat unclear to me why would a serious cosmologist publish there, or, to be more precise I have had an impression it's not common for them to publish there, the journal being very general.
I think you interpreted the description of the journal to mean that the journal would let anyone publish, if they would pay a $5,200 fee.
Instead, the journal is an open-access journal, meaning that anyone can read the articles without paying a fee. They offset their costs by charging the authors a publication fee if their work is accepted by the editor after peer review. I'm not saying that I like this business model, but it's fairly standard.
As an aside, by your own math this journal is in the top 2% of all publications. Plenty of people across disciplines would be very happy to publish in this journal.
No, only published articles.
> Still, it is still somewhat unclear to me why would a serious cosmologist publish there
It's an extremely well known, high 'ranking' journal if you go by IF as your figures show. There aren't many higher they could have published in, and they're extremely competitive.
And yes, the processing charge is exorbitant, because it's Nature Comm and they can demand that. Publishing is a mess, but don't doubt Nature Comm of all journals, especially ones affiliated with the Nature, aren't "reliable" judging solely on reputation.