My train of thought is still running. Last week, taken aback by the revelation of Elsevier’s deep support for the Research Works Act, an anti open-access piece of US legislation, I declined to review a manuscript for the publisher and wrote about my reasons for doing so. My blogpost received an unusual amount of traffic. It seemed to have caught a wave – started elsewhere – that is sweeping through the scientific blogosphere.

My previous post on Elsevier and the Research Works Act (RWA) stimulated a conversation on Twitter with Benoit Bruneau about the possible impact on the journals of scientific societies of moves to open access publishing.  This is an aspect of the debate that has not been discussed in much detail of late.

All relationships suffer tensions from time to time, especially those based on love-hate. Scientists have a complex relationship with their publishers — they love to get published in high-impact journals (most of which are run by major publishing companies) but hate the abuses of impact factors made by their own community in promotion and funding committees.

The job of a newspaper columnist is to agitate and George Monbiot did exactly that last week with a furious rant in The Guardian about academic publishers.

This is, to my mind, a quite astonishing report about Nature Publishing Group (NPG) hiking its proposed 2011 journal subscription charges to the University of California (UC) by 400%. (NPG is the company that runs the Nature Network blogging platform). That’s right: 400%. I know nothing about the ins and outs of this deal.

If this paper is the future of open access publishing, then we are in for an interesting ride. And it’s a journey that will reveal a great deal more about the process of science than most outsiders will have seen hitherto.