Maybe I’m missing something, but if Nature charges that much to publish why does anyone publish in Nature? Why don’t academics just create their own ‘ethically priced’ journal? It’s my understanding that most of Nature’s labor is voluntary and unpaid anyway.
You can create your own ethically priced journal any day of the week, but if no one reads it, no one will publish to it. And if no one publishes to it, no one will read it. Offering cheap or free publishing doesn’t solve this chicken-and-egg problem, unfortunately. Quite the opposite; it signals that the researchers who publish there are only doing so because they can’t afford the publishing fees of larger journals, presumably because their research isn’t interesting or noteworthy enough to attract enough money to do so. Honestly, $10k is a drop in the bucket when grants are in the millions.
Grants are only in the millions in certain fields. But more than that, $10K per paper, budgeted for 2-3 papers a year in a 3-5 year grant across all the NIH grants, is a lot of taxpayer money that could be better spent funding students, postdocs, and researchers.
