Accra — Researchers from low- and lower-middle-income countries will now be able to publish for free in Nature and 36 other Nature research journals, as the company expands its waiver policies to include its flagship titles.
Under open access (OA) publishing, readers can access published papers for free but researchers or their institutions have to pay article processing charges to get their manuscripts published.
In the past, it meant that scientists from low- and middle-income countries were effectively excluded, as there is little institutional support to cover article processing charges, which sometimes total more than their yearly salaries.
"[Article processing charges can be] equivalent to about two years' salary of a full professor in Nigeria and many other African countries," explained Segun Fatumo, an associate professor of genetic epidemiology and bioinformatics at the Medical Research Centre/Uganda Virus Research Institute.
"No wonder many scientific outputs of scientists from low- and middle-income countries end up in mediocre ... predatory journals."
Marcelo Aizen, a professor of ecology at the National University of Comahue in Argentina, agreed with Fatumo. He said monthly salaries for top scientists in Argentina round up to about US$1,000, and annual grants round up to US$3,000 so they are simply not able to afford the publication costs of most prestigious academic journals.
"In some cases, you can still negotiate a waiver, which in fact puts you in a quite humiliating position, but this is not even an option for many journals," explained Aizen. "The whole scientific publication system is quite perverse when you think that we work for free for the publishers as authors, reviewers, and associate editors and that on top of that, we have to pay for publishing our work."
While Nature and other top-tier journals usually charge readers to access research papers, Nature's parent company Springer Nature announced in late 2020 that researchers would be able to publish their manuscripts in the main Nature journal and 32 other Nature journals under the so-called Gold OA model, where articles are freely accessible as soon as they are published.
Yet until the new waiver policy, the main journals were not included in Springer Nature's existing fee waiver programme for researchers from low- and middle-income countries, which only covered full open-access journals such as Nature Communications and Communications Physics.
Enabling free access
"We have done this because these journals are unique," a spokesperson for the company explained. "It is a specific provision to support a subset of authors and only applies to our highly selective Nature Portfolio transformative journals as they transition to OA.
"By enabling research to be permanently and freely available online for anyone to read, everyone has access to research that can inform our approaches to some of the world's most pressing challenges," the spokesperson added.
Among the 37 journals included in the initiative are Nature Biotechnology, Nature Climate, Nature Medicine, Nature Sustainability and Nature Water, according to a statement published earlier this month (9 January).
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In the statement, Deborah Sweet, vice-president for the Nature Journals, said: "I am delighted that at Nature and the Nature Research Journals, we are now able to offer OA to researchers from the low- and lower-middle-income countries at no cost to them.
"As part of Springer Nature, we are committed to supporting the transition to OA and a part of this is to ensure that authors from less well-funded countries who wish to publish OA in this unique portfolio of titles are able to do so."
This piece was produced by SciDev.Net's Sub-Saharan Africa English desk.
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