Color Figures
francis niestemski
Friday, 05 October 2007 16:54 UTC
Is it possible to print figures in black and white in the publication and then have them show up in color in the online versions as is done in PRL and some other journals.
I wouldn’t ask because the publication looks beautiful in color and should be kept that way, but it is quite expensive for the contributors.
Thank you
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Replies
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Our policy is to publish colour figures when the colour is essential. We ask authors to pay less than half of the processing cost to us. If an author cannot pay that charge (for example, if it cannot be offest against the author’s grant — many grants support publication charges), the editor waives the charge and we publish the colour figures at no cost to the author (if the editor judges that the colour is essential as opposed to decorative). This is done all the time.
I use the word “essential” — for many disciplines, figures cannot be printed in B&W as they would not be meaningful. Cell biology, stereo pairs of chemical structures, and so on. The authors need those figures printed in colour, so your proposal would not work for many of our authors.
(It sounds from your question as if the colour in the figures you are thinking of is not “essential”, as you imply that a reader of the print edition could understand the point being made from the B&W figure. If that is the case, then one could argue that the colour insn’t necessary in the online version of the paper either.)
If authors wish to purchase reprints of anything they have published in Nature that contains colour images, they can purchase the reprints with B&W figures, which makes them much cheaper.
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