There has been some outrage at the announcement that Nature is following through with their 2004 declaration of charging ~10k ($/€) in article processing charges (APCs). However, not only have these charges been 16 years in the making but the original declaration was made not on some obscure blog, but at a UK parliamentary inquiry. So nobody could rightfully claim that we couldn’t have seen this development coming from miles away.

Last week, there was a lot of outrage at the announcement of Nature’s new pricing options for their open access articles. People took to twitter to voice their, ahem, concern. Some examples: There are many more that all express their outrage at the gall of Nature to charge their authors these sums,. even Forbes interviewed some of them.

I was talking to a speaker visiting our department recently. While discussing his postdoc work from years ago, he told me about the identification of the sperm factor that causes calcium oscillations in the egg at fertilisation. It was an interesting tale because the group who eventually identified the factor – now widely accepted as PLCzeta – had earlier misidentified the factor, naming it oscillin.

Arguably, there is little that could be more decisive for the career of a scientist than publishing a paper in one of the most high-profile journals such as Nature or Science . After all, in this competitive and highly specialized days, where a scientist is published all too often is more important than what they have published.

There is a fairly scathing editorial in Nature [The new zoo. (2013). Nature, 503(7476), 311–312. doi:10.1038/503311b ] that reacts to a recent paper by Dubois et al.:To quote the editorial:Ouch! But Dubois et al.'s paper pretty much deserves this reaction - it's a reactionary rant that is breathtaking in it's lack of perspective.

A nice article by Brendan Borrell about the secret life of herpetologist Edward Taylor, and Rafe Brown's efforts to untangle his taxonomic legacy has appeared in Nature :Fascinating article, but as always I'm going to skip straight past the content and look at links. The article leads with Ptychozoon intermedium , the Philippine parachute gecko.

I'm a big fan of the work Nature publishing group is doing in experimenting with new methods of publishing, such as their iOS apps (which inspired me to "clone" their iPhone app) and the Encode app with the concept of "threads". But there's an aspect of the iPad app that puzzles me: Nature's app doesn't know that a linked article elsewhere in Nature is also available using the app.

The release of the ENCODE (ENCyclopedia Of DNA Element) project has generated much discussion (see Fighting about ENCODE and junk). Perhaps perversely, I'm more interested in the way Nature has packaged the information than the debate about how much of our DNA is "junk." Nature has a website (http://www.nature.com/encode/) that demonstrates the use of "threads" to navigate through a set of papers.

One thing I'm increasingly conscious of is that I've a lot of demos and toy projects hanging around and the code for most of these isn't readily available. So, I plan to clean these up and put them in GitHub so others can explore the code, and reuse it if they see fit.First up is the code to create a HTML+Javascript clone of Nature's iPhone app, as described in an earlier post.There's a live version of the clone here here.

Image via Wikipedia Nature Publishing Group yesterday announced a new venture, very closely modelled on the success of PLoS ONE, titled Scientific Reports. Others have started to cover the details and some implications so I won’t do that here. I think there are three big issues here. What does this tell us about the state of Open Access? What are the risks and possibilities for NPG?