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  • petersuberpetersuber
    Jun 12, 2026, 2:27 PM

    "We published in Nature Medicine in 2025 for free. In 2026, it cost us $12,850."
    statnews.com/2026/06/11/open-a
    ()

    There's a lot going on in this confused and confusing article.

    * The author and her co-authors were foolish to pay $12,850 for a Nature Medicine APC. They could have published the same article for a lower fee, or no fee, at many other respected journals. They didn't pay for quality. They paid for journal branding or prestige.

    * The author says her team paid for the APC "to comply" with the NIH policy. Untrue. Complying with the NIH policy is free of charge. They paid the APC to publish in Nature Medicine.

    * The author says that APCs "pose barriers to making NIH-funded research available to the public." Untrue. NIH makes funded research available to the public through () no matter where the author chooses to publish and no matter whether the author chooses to pay an APC.

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Replies

  • lower-value human capitalsennoma@chaos.social
    Jun 12, 2026, 3:04 PM

    @petersuber You write: "They paid for journal branding or prestige."

    It's just hit me that those aren't the same things, though publishers try to conflate them: the branding is intended to create the prestige, which is a species of bullshit. For-profit publishers speak as though prestige exists, but OA advocates should talk about journal BRANDING instead.

    The people we're trying to convince might be happy to pay for prestige, but will resent the hell out of paying for branding.

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  • petersuberpetersuber
    Jun 12, 2026, 3:35 PM

    @sennoma
    Good point. Sometimes journal branding carries prestige and sometimes it doesn't. Journal branding is guaranteed by publishing there, prestige isn't. Both branding and prestige have a contingent, indirect, and tenuous relationship with quality.

    I explore more of these issues in an essay from my old newsletter: Thinking about prestige, quality, and open access (2008).
    nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.Inst

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