Nature’s OA fee seems outrageously high – but many will pay it

A point which Professor Bishop touches upon in her final sentence but which needs to be developed further is the idea of "paying for peer review". In essence, I am certain authors are not paying for peer review but paying for peer review to be facilitated: peer reviewers rarely receive remuneration for their labour. Instead, they do it either through a sense of duty towards their scientific community or, more cynically, to ingratiate themselves to editors for when they submit to the same journal. Maybe it is time for reviewers to stop working for free for journals which are making vast profits from our peer reviewing?

So yet more open access publications for the richest. The established rate is too high for most and the rate for Nature is exorbitant. Given that authors now do far more of the work than when I started in the days of submitting physical manuscripts, the whole thing is a rip-off. Makes me glad to be in the last stage of my career and almost free of the crazy system that has developed.