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Comment by jswrenn | Hacker News Reader

This title is a little editorialized. Gates Foundation research cannot be published in non-open-access journals—"top" or otherwise.

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Nature wants to push the notion that open-access is not where "top" papers are published in order to protect its aging business model, so from their perespective, it makes perfect sense.

Link? I haven't seen Nature claim or try to push any FUD that open-access publications do not have top papers.

They don't make the claim that "open access"==Wire Transfer Letters". Trouble is, Wire Transfer Letters not only exist, they are on the rise, and if the promotion committee at your unranked regional university accepts papers published there for Promotion & Tenure the problem has been shifted around.

Sorry, what's a Wire Transfer Letter in this context?

Not snail mail.

"Letters" in this context mean short communications, publications shorter than a full-length paper. Back in the day, Tetrahedron (then published by Pergamon Press, founded by the scintillating fraud and far-seeing visionary [1] Robert Maxwell, and now owned by Elsevier, and that isn't a step up) was the gutter journal that would print anything. But if something was too damn awful and thin even for Tetrahedron, then Tetrahedron Letters would surely print it.

Wire Transfer Letters because you must wire-transfer them the page charges for your paper that was generated by a Markov chain before they print it, and because the sketchy publisher sits far away in a country known for sketchy dealings. OMICS Publishers, we are looking at you!

Can someone enlighten the audience about what happened to Beall's List?! Another suit?

[1] Pergamon was founded in 1951

This was such a beautiful comment. Elsevirus is a step down from Weekly World News. The graphical abstracts would make Jack Chick proud.

> Can someone enlighten the audience about what happened to Beall's List?! Another suit?

Trying to track this down. People are taking cache copies right now, ready to put up at a second's notice (or just do so anyway).

Seems much more drastically editorialized, to be honest. My first impression reading the headline was that there was some sort of ethical dispute resulting in a ban (why else would you be unable to publish in "top journals?"). This bit of data regarding the open access requirement--also present in the opening paragraph of the article--offers a ton of clarity, but given the conflict of interest, the title itself is pretty rich.

Yes! A title change is warranted. A proper title would be something like "Gates Foundation to require immediate open access to supported research"

And Peter Suber has a good analysis here https://plus.google.com/u/1/+PeterSuber/posts/dU6tWcorZEV

It is very editorialized. "Nature and other top journals refuse to consider papers with Open Access requirements" is just as truthful, but presents a different antagonist.

This is Nature trying to make out that their problem is something wrong with the Gates policy. Oh dear, what a pity, never mind.

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