Financial Resources and Publishing in Scientific Reports?

As some of you know, I am not exactly the biggest fan of the journal Scientific Reports, which is brought to us by the Nature Publishing Group.

I won't get into my specific grievances here, though the journal now appears to have hit a new low with their pay-to-play peer-review activities (e.g., with authors allowed to pay for a fast-track peer review that uses a different and third party peer-review service rather than normal peer review). As discussed here and here, one editor has already resigned. Good! I hope many other Scientific Reports editors follow suit, and some of my peeps from the complex-systems community are also fighting back: they have sent a letter to the Powers That Be at Scientific Reports. I am sharing this letter with permission.

I hope more editors from Scientific Reports resign and that that forces them to either go under or, better yet, to change to have more reasonable policies on such things. (Ideally, they would also improve other epically bad aspects of their venue, but that is a story for another day.)