Nature makes all articles free to view

For those not in the know, Nature is THE journal to be in if you want to be successful in bioscience. It is peer reviewed, fairly exclusive, and they generally only publish game changer style science. If you are in science, and you get a first author Nature paper, your ticket is punched and you are about to have a moderately successful career.<p>For all the nitpicking going on about the delivery method, searching, and it not being &quot;enough&quot;, this will largely not matter to scientists. Articles are generally shared by DOI or PMID, indexing is very specific. If not, relevant papers in the field are nearly known by heart and new info from competing labs is checked on daily. Problems 1 and 2 are not as underserved as HN thinks.<p>This is a monster announcement for institutions that may not have the money for a Nature sub, and the public at large to have better access to such a powerful archive of historically hidden info. The fact that it&#x27;s not delivered in a DRM-free format for every device ever all the way back to the oldest article is nothing compared to how incredibly huge this is. I am spamming this to all my old lab buddies as we speak.<p>TL;DR: The output system for academic publishing sucks at the high end, but it just got a lot less sucky.

Key quote: &quot;All research papers from Nature will be made free to read in a proprietary screen-view format that can be annotated but not copied, printed or downloaded.&quot;<p>It sounds like:<p>* you may have to install the ReadCube reader to view the protected PDFs, unclear if you can view them in a regular PDF viewer. (&quot;ReadCube (...) will be used to host and display read-only versions of the articles&#x27; PDFs&quot;)<p>* only subscribers can initiate access sharing of specific articles, going back only to 1997 for individual subscribers. It sounds like the general public will not be able to search for articles and view them through the Nature website.<p>Well, it&#x27;s a step forward.

My institution subscribes to Nature, and using my library&#x27;s proxy to access the Nature website, I can use the &quot;Share&#x2F;bookmark&quot; menu to generate links like <a href="http://rdcu.be/bKk4" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;rdcu.be&#x2F;bKk4</a>, <a href="http://rdcu.be/bKlc" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;rdcu.be&#x2F;bKlc</a>, <a href="http://rdcu.be/bKld" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;rdcu.be&#x2F;bKld</a>, and <a href="http://rdcu.be/bKli" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;rdcu.be&#x2F;bKli</a>, which can be viewed in the browser (or maybe only because I also just installed the ReadCube app?).<p>The articles linked to above span several months, but it&#x27;s generating serial links, so I can only assume that it&#x27;s able to track visits back to the subscriber and&#x2F;or my university account.<p>The ReadCube HTML5 reader looks nice, but does not work with JavaScript disabled (no surprise there). It uses JavaScript to override text selection (disabling copy&amp;paste), but after a little meddling with the developer tools and element inspector, you can find a decently near ancestor to the text and copy the DOM as html. Stick that into a new file and you can select (and copy) the text without too much further hassle.<p>The DOM is awkward and split up kind of like a PDF (selecting a range of text goes haywire in unpredictable cases), but in comparing the HTML DOM hierarchy to the text object structure in the original PDF (which, as a subscriber, I can download), I found no obvious similarities, so I&#x27;m guessing they aren&#x27;t translating the PDF to HTML directly.

Their definition of &quot;free&quot; is interesting. Only paid subscribers can search for articles, and apparently others can view articles only if subscribers share links with them. For many purposes, articles might be &quot;free&quot; but still hidden from the public.

Incorrect title. &quot;Nature places all article in flakey peephole viewer.&quot;

I paid for the research with my tax payer money. Give me full access to the articles. Anything less is unacceptable (unless Nature wants to pay me back the taxes they owe me).

I like the idea of shared annotations. Or more specifically I like the idea of Science as a conversation. It has always frustrated me that papers are formatted for print and don&#x27;t include hyperlinks, and it&#x27;s difficult to add comments or corrections to a paper.<p>Like others though I am not sure I believe that publishers should continue to exist in anything like their current form.

Still a long way to go, but this is a huge step forward.<p>It&#x27;s also not the first time Macmillan have tried something new - their whole Digital Science arm (which includes ReadCube) is focused on innovation and disruptive publishing tech: <a href="http://www.digital-science.com/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.digital-science.com&#x2F;</a>

Does this BS marketing PR stunt qualify Nature-published research papers for Gates Foundation-backed research now? Meaning: does this announcement qualify Nature as &quot;open&quot; enough for the Gates Foundation?

&quot; Nature&#x27;s internal costs of publishing run at £20,000–30,000 (US$31,000–47,000) per paper, an extremely high charge to load onto authors or funders rather than spread over subscribers.&quot;<p>What in the digital world would make it so expensive to publish content ?

When you are feeling all touchy feely about this move, keep in mind the profit margins at academic publishers are higher than Apple. Yes, THAT Apple.<p>Source: <a href="https://alexholcombe.wordpress.com/2013/01/09/scholarly-publishers-and-their-high-profits/" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;alexholcombe.wordpress.com&#x2F;2013&#x2F;01&#x2F;09&#x2F;scholarly-publ...</a>

For half a second after I clicked through to ReadCube&#x27;s site I thought it must be associated with Google because their website&#x27;s design is the Googleist thing I&#x27;ve ever seen not actually associated with Google.<p><a href="https://www.readcube.com/" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.readcube.com&#x2F;</a>

&quot;Everything is free to read* they say. But there’s an asterisk, pesky and persistent, next to read. And it’s a big one.The asterisk is that you can’t do anything but read the document, and you have to download use their proprietary reader software in order to read the document, and you have to hope that someone who has a subscription or is a journalist is kind enough to share a link to the document that you want to read, and if you try to do anything other than look at the document passively on a screen you’re basically gonna get sued for copyright infringement.&quot; <a href="http://del-fi.org/post/104125242971/natures-shareware-moment" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;del-fi.org&#x2F;post&#x2F;104125242971&#x2F;natures-shareware-moment</a><p>But by all means, let&#x27;s celebrate a step forward taken by Nature.

Better headline: Nature will allow subscribers and media to decide who else can view articles for free

Well here is the link to my paper in Nature <a href="http://rdcu.be/bKB9" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;rdcu.be&#x2F;bKB9</a>

Nature did <i>not</i> make all articles free to view. That&#x27;s a misleading announcement. What they did is far more limited. If you have a paid Nature subscription, you can get a link which you can send to someone else. They can then read a DRM-protected PDF-like file through a proprietary on-line viewer.<p>If you want to read an article right now, it&#x27;s $18 and up. Or you can now &quot;rent&quot; the article for $3.99 and up and view it in their proprietary viewer for a short period.<p>This is decidedly not &quot;open access publication&quot;.

Schools should really start teaching the concept of Turing completeness to kids, otherwise we&#x27;ll get to the heat death of the universe with non technical people still thinking that this kind of crap is an acceptable solution.

<i>free to read in a proprietary screen-view format</i><p>Free, under our control.

To take advantage of this you need a piece of software called Readcube which is available only for Windows and Mac.<p>Users of Linux and Android cannot avail of it.

I would love to get my hands on some of the articles from 1869. Hopefully someone will share a few of these articles publicly.

Does the in-browser viewer use the new W3C-blessed DRM extensions?

Limited is the new free.

One step more towards the Democratization of knowledge!

Does the browser viewer use the new W3C DRM extensions?

This is a lame half assed solution.

Not free at all.

I never paid anything to view birds and snakes and lice and dogs and cats and...<p>Did someone hijack nature to extort money from unsuspecting passers-by?

Off topic: Why is this article dated December 2nd? It is still December 1st everywhere in the United States. Perhaps it was published after normal business hours on the 1st, thus defaulting to the 2nd as the official date? Just curious.