Bye, nature.com
Been reading headlines in nature.com for a while now (ever since installing sage in firefox). There’s been a gradual, and not particularly surprising, shift in how they handle web access to content… first, anyone could read it, no login required. Then, they wanted people to log in, and urged folks to subscribe for “premium” access… but you could still just log in for free and read the article that caught your eye. And it’s Nature, after all.
So I saw a headline for “Scientists stumped by dual push for open access, secrecy”. Sounds interesting. Very timely – some related questions came up in some of the forensics talks this week at FACSS. The irony is that nature.com, at least, doesn’t appear to be “stumped” at all… now only “premium” subscribers can read content. Can’t fault them for wanting to cover costs on it (although $6 a month sounds slightly excessive… it’s not like they weren’t already preparing most of the content anyway, in a different format), but it’s amusing that they picked “secrecy” over “open access” now. (Especially given their previous support for the Public Library of Science.)
