can you spare a dime? [or rather 113,900?]

Just read the announcement in Nature of 24 November that

Publisher Springer Nature has announced how scientists can make their papers in its most selective titles free to read as soon as they are published.

which is presented as a great advance to make scientific papers available for all to read. The catch is that there is no free lunch, obviously, as the author(s) have to pay Springer a 1,514,324.68 krónur charge for immediate open access! The Nature article does mention the issue obviously, as this is such a huge amount of money that it makes publishing under such conditions inaccessible for all academics but those with sufficient funding grants. It also mentions an alternate scheme contemplated by some Nature outlets to introduce “a non-refundable fee of €2,190 to cover an editorial assessment and the peer-review process.” None of the fee going to reviewers, apparently. This “evolution” (?!) is driven by the EU Plan S for making scientific publications available to all, but it even more crucially calls for a radical reassessment of publishing policies for research that is publicly funded and publicly reviewed, then paid again by publicly funded libraries and institutions. Even more radical than India’s push for `One nation, one subscription’.