My paper 🌐DOI:10.1038/s41598-025-06818-9 got published today, and I’m really impressed with the bold upselling strategies of this particular publisher.

I got the generous optional offer to order reprints of my article. I can even order them as ePrints, which will be sent as a PDF to me that I can then share with 25 colleagues for a total price of just around 143 USD (before tax). In my opinion, that offer does not make any sense for an Open Access article published under a CC BY license.

I did not ask for the price for getting an actual physical reprint, but I think it will not pay out, even if it is printed on handmade paper with pigments made from pure gold and fairy dust using a hand-carved woodblock for printing.

And by the way, the university already burned multiple bucks just for the APC to make this article available as open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. So, everyone is already allowed to read, download, share, distribute, reuse, and print this article for free. You can even upload the article 🌐DOI:10.1038/s41598-025-06818-9 to your favorite shadow library.

Right before I sent this article, I thought for a moment, what if this email is just a scam and some 3rd-party just harvests recently published articles and tries to sell services (utilizing the freedom of the CC BY license) to uninformed authors. Especially as the e-mail did not come from the domain of the publisher. But when I followed the link “Reprints and permissions” under the licence block of the article, I ended up on the same domain. So, for the moment, I must assume that this email is genuine.