Open-access publishers are also looking at new ways of doing business. Frontiers, for example, does not try to judge a paper's significance during peer review, only its accuracy—an approach also adopted by the Public Library of Science (PLoS), a non-commercial organisation based in San Francisco that was one of the pioneers of open-access publishing. It thus accepts 80-90% of submissions.

Instead, a Frontiers paper’s merit is gauged after publication, using measures like the number of downloads. Frontiers also doubles as a social network for researchers to share news, job offers and information about conferences and events. This network currently has around 70,000 members.

PeerJ, founded last year, makes an even more dramatic departure from tradition. Rather than being charged publication fees, authors pay a one-off membership fee, which ranges from $99 to $298, depending on how many papers they want to publish each year. All co-authors must be members. The firm also deals neatly with the question of peer review. Members must review at least one paper a year.

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Other aspects of open-access publishing also draw polite scepticism from incumbents. The promiscuous approach of Frontiers and PLoS, for example, is at odds with the rejection by publications like Nature and its American counterpart, Science, of over 90% of submitted manuscripts. It is this selectivity that gives these journals their prestige. At the moment, publication in Nature, Science and a handful of similar journals is like a sprinkling of fairy dust. Everyone knows how tough it is to get in, so papers that do so are assumed to be special. This will be hard for open-access publications to emulate.

The rejected papers all have to be scrutinised, though—and even though peer review is free, this involves staff time and other costs. According to Nature, the cost per published paper is $40,000. If Nature is to stay in business in anything like its current form, someone will have to pay that.