Nature journals too expensive

I get the updates on journal by nature. But when you click the link to read the article you are asked to purchase the article (see this article on Lidar :Mapping the world in 3D ). The article costs $38 USD! So I wrote to Nature telling them this is an order of magnitude off in pricing! What do you think? Should science be easier to access.. is Nature shooting themselves in the foot?

my comment to nature photonics:

Why is the price for an article $30 USD?!! When I can buy magazines for $5, music albums for $10, books for $20, iPhone apps for $1-10, why would anyone pay $30 for a 1-2 page article! I know that the majority of your subscribers are universities, but not all of them. You are missing a huge group of scientists who would probably pay to read these articles, but not the price your asking!
May I suggest an iPhone/iPad / kindle app that lets me download papers and read them. You know that to any given scientist maybe 1/4 of the articles in any journal are of interest to them, so buying every journal is not as valuable as you may think.

What many do is get colleges to get the pdf for them, scan copies, or most of the time we go to an open access journal. I've never read Nature Photonics (aside from copies sent to me by friends) but use Optics Express all the time.
I think your journal is good, but inaccessible.. which mean not relevant. Please change this. Scientists are not payed that well, and personal copies are nice to have. Remember that we are blog readers.. so browsing and picking useful work is what we do, but with these costly journals there is no point.

Cheers

Rodger

Yea! Google wave invitation!

I finally got my invitation to goole wave!! While google wave sounds totally cool, I think its not going to really peak until it there are enough people signed up.. but really.. I haven't done anything more then send invites to a friend in spain. I think I'll also send one to some in Vancover, San Fran, a Toronto jazz artist, someone who likes sports and politics, and my brothers. I really like the combination. Astrophysicist, carpenter, economist, environmental engineer, drummer, waiter/legal-assistant, economist, and two scientist.

Open access journals

I've been looking for open access journals to publish in. One of the main ones we use is Optics Express. Its a little pricy, but free to read.

In Eileen's Blog she mentions a talk on this topic. I hope that more universities take this seriously. Its very disturbing that so much research is done on public funds, but the public has no access to their results.

One of the better know groups is the Public Library of Science (PLoS), but their journals are mainly medicine and biology related.

What I've found so far;

Open Renewable Energy Journal

The International Journal of Photoenergy; seems to be mainly chemistry type stuff

Geotermia, a Mexican journal on geothermal studies.

To find open access journals check out the Directory of Open Access Journals

Seems like OREJ is the best bet for what I'm looking at publishing. If you know of any other journals, please leave a comment.