"The House of Commons (U.K.) Select Committee on Science and Technology investigated Open Access publishing alternatives, and pursuant to this obtained written evidence from Nature Publishing Group consisting of answers to specific questions about "pay to publish." Here are excerpts from the document. Given the current discussion on Open Access publishing, this may be of interest to you" - Bora Zivkovic

While their answer to "What proportion of the average article cost is taken up with peer review? Can you supply a breakdown of the costs of peer review?" makes some sense, I think the right answer is the cost to Nature of doing the actual peer review, which iiuc is $0. That is, the cost of peer review should be separated from the cost of administering that review. - j1m

"The GBP30,000 figure was arrived at simply by dividing the annual income of Nature (GBP30 million) by the number of research papers published (1,000)" -- and why, pray tell, should we be concerned about maintaining Nature's income at that particular level? - Bill Hooker

They also state a figure relating to the costs not to the income: " The £10,000 figure is derived from estimates of the costs of selecting, reviewing, editing, designing and producing the research article element of Nature and the amount NPG would need to charge in order to cover these expenses adequately." The values are for Nature alone not NPG as a whole. - Pedro Beltrao

i put some thoughts on this here: http://floatingnotes.tumblr.com/post... - mad -