Please do read the post for the full analysis, but I will briefly summarise in a thread ... [0/3] https://twitter.com/SV_POW/status/1337322240254341120

1st thought: the €9,500 figure wasn’t pulled out of thin air. It’s what Springer Nature needs to charge to maintain its revenue at the same level. We are ALREADY paying €9,500 for each Nature article, but not noticing because that cost is spread across many subscriptions. [1/3]

2nd thought: almost all the scientific value of a paper published in Nature, over that of the manuscript before it went to that venue, is in peer-review. Which WE provide. We (as authors and reviewers) are donating almost everything that they sell for €9,500. [2/3]

3rd thought: the only way to avoid this waste of money, and the pressure on researchers to support this toxic system, is to STOP EVALUATING PAPERS ON THE BASIS OF WHAT JOURNAL THEY APPEAR IN and judge them instead on their intrinsic merit. [3/3]

(I know the observation that we must judge research on its own merits instead of by venue is not a novel one — it's what @DORAssessment is all about. But it's never been more important, and the need for it has never been clearer than in the stark light of Nature's €9,500 APC.)