Biology needs one journal, not 4,000, says Nobel prizewinner

A Nobel prizewinning biologist has hit out at the “huge amount of money” made by the Nature group of periodicals, claiming his discipline could function with just a single mega-journal.

Speaking at the annual Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting, Aaron Ciechanover, the Israeli biologist who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2004, took aim at the high cost of scientific publishing which, he argued, was linked to the importance attached by scientists to publishing in big-name journals.

“Everyone wants to have a paper in Cell, Science or Nature, which is wrong – we are celebrating where you are published rather than what you have published,” explained Professor Ciechanover at the event in southern Germany, where about 40 Nobel-winning scientists have gathered, along with hundreds of young scientists.

Professor Ciechanover, a research professor at Technion Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, criticised the recent proliferation of journals under the Nature banner, of which its flagship title Nature charges a gold open access fee of €9,750 (£8,290).

“Nature has more than 120 journals and are making a huge amount of money,” said Professor Ciechanover, referring to owner Springer Nature’s €1.7 billion revenue in 2021, from which it drew profit of £387 million.

“It is costing a quarter of million dollars on average to publish a paper,” continued Professor Ciechanover on the total cost of research, adding that institutions were then hit by high page publishing costs or article processing charges.

“Then your library has to pay a million dollars a year to pay for the right to access it,” he said, adding: “This is completely untransparent.”

Professor Ciechanover, whose Nobel-winning papers on cell degradation were published in relatively unheralded non-profit journals in the early 1980s, believed that “there should be one journal for biology, not 4,000”.

“Everything should be in one journal and it should be peer reviewed, and then test of time will show the things that work,” argued the former Massachusetts Institute of Technology researcher, who said citations would help to highlight innovative or impactful research.

Deborah Sweet, vice-president for the Nature journals, said their focus “continues to be on offering exceptional value” and “recent data shows that research articles in these journals are cited 17 times more and downloaded around 27 times more than articles published in mid-tier journals”.

“We get over 68,000 research papers submitted each year to Nature or a Nature research journal across a wide range of subject and interdisciplinary areas, of which we publish less than 10 per cent,” she explained.

“All of these need to be assessed and managed – not just the ones we publish. To do this, we have over 300 highly qualified specialist staff, including over 200 dedicated in-house editors personally guiding and supporting authors to ensure their final manuscript is the best it can possibly be.”

Professor Ciechanover’s proposal comes as the European Union considers how it can support non-profit diamond journals, including by expanding its own open access research portal into a “collective, non-profit, large-scale publishing service for the public good” that could offer an alternative to commercial publishers – a move not dissimilar to Professor Ciechanover’s idea.

The motion to promote “immediate and unrestricted open access” without author fees was backed by the European Council last month, but received a mixed response from the League of European Research Universities, which noted that the scale of the proposed project was “massive” and a “single pan-European system is not likely to work successfully”.

jack.grove@timeshighereducation.com