Nature boss warns Plan S could put journal out of business

"Mr Inchcoombe pointed to the results of a Springer Nature survey which indicated that open access was a low priority for researchers .... The title’s relevance to the discipline, its reputation, its impact factor and its readership were more important". That simply reflects the mindless, tick-box approach of so many grant awarding bodies and their focus on "prestigious" journal titles when assessing research merit. And, happily, that is precisely what is now being challenged under Plan S. “Those prestigious journals are very different from the vast majority". Well, one can't argue with that; their penchant for publishing headline-grabbing tripe that is subsequently retracted has been well-established; see eg Fang & Casadevall 2011 https://iai.asm.org/content/79/10/3855.full (esp Fig 1).

I do the work day night in the lab, generate data, and I pay to publish it, and sadly I have to pay to read my own work. this whole publishing business has been abused by Nature and its like wise. this must stop.

I agree with robmat59 that the case made in https://iai.asm.org/content/79/10/3855.full is reasonably compelling.

> Another option would be for the creation of open access “sister” titles. No it wouldn't. Plan S has explicitly ruled them out. > Inchcoombe: “Yes. I don’t know why libraries would pay for subscriptions if there are free, aggregated services of all the author-accepted versions of papers immediately available on multiple websites around the world – which these principles would enable.” Plan S funders account for < 10% of published articles. No librarian in their right mind would cancel on the basis of such a small number of green OA articles. I'm afraid Nature has to do something. The status quo is not an option. If they don't want to lose all these valuable Plan S authored papers from Jan 2020 they will have to either a) flip to OA; b) allow unembargoed green OA with a CC-BY licence. I'd recommend the latter as the former is impractical