That was on November 24, 2020. Martin van den Ende remembers well the message posted on Twitter by one of the two largest scientific journals in the world, temper nature. “The Nature Collection journals will charge authors up to €9,500 for free access to scientific articles, a long-awaited alternative,” learn there.

To understand how such an amount can be presented as good news, we have to go back to how scientific publishing works. Two economic models dominate: the subscription model, where the reader pays to read, and the open access model, where articles can be viewed for free. And there, subscription revenue disappears, hence the publishers’ desire to pass costs upstream.

Pay for easy access to your business

So researchers must pay fees to make their work available. “Except that the work of science editors is minimal when it comes to an online-only journal”notes Martin van den Ende, a geophysicist at the Interdisciplinary Institute for Artificial Intelligence (3IA Côte d’Azur). “Coordination is done by the authors themselves, correction is done on a voluntary basis by other researchers in the same field, and it is the famous correction by their peers.”

Researchers recognize it, and therefore citizens pay three times. To fund research, for peer review, and finally to publish or read.

“The online scientific journal costs less than 1,000 euros per year in hosting and technical support costs,” Post-doc file encrypted. Together with other geophysicists, he decided to launch his journal, earthquakes. The post, on seismology, should be online in early June and be available “Diamond”It is free to publish and read.

→ Zoom in. Scientific research: HAL, free French-style access

But then, where do the few hundred euros needed to run their review come from? Mainly from Canadian McGill University, which has a dedicated open science program. In France, the CNRS supports such initiatives and announced, at the beginning of February, an action plan to reach “Diamond”.