Nature is to start up an open-access scientific journal. The new journal, to be called Scientific Reports, will cover biology, chemistry, the earth sciences and physics.
The story, in the Times Higher Education Supplement, concentrates on the implications for subscription-based journals, but it is interesting also to consider whether this will have any effect on attempts to keep sceptics out of the scientific literature.
Like the Public Library of Science's PLoS ONE journal, Scientific Reports will be entirely open access and will publish every submission deemed by a faster peer-review process to be technologically sound - including those reporting useful negative results.
One wonders if a "faster" peer-review process, 88 pages of peer review correspondence can simply be replaced with the word "No".