Interestingly this is the first issue of Nature Astronomy, I hadn't known until now that they were making a topical journal (similar to Nature Geoscience, etc.) Looking through the different abstracts in the issue, I have to be honest, they don't seem very different than normal papers you find everyday on arXiv. I don't think it's a good thing to have another journal in this case, since Nature is not open access friendly.
To be honest, I don't know too much about Nature Publishing Group, but what I do know is that the standard astronomical journal in America, the Astrophysical Journal (ApJ, "ap-jay"), is very well. It's owned by the American Astronomical Society (AAS) and published by the Institute of Physics (IOP) [1] which is itself a non-profit and does great work in education and other fields. They have a lenient policy where articles become open-access after 12-months.
My point is, they're not blood-suckers like Elsevier :) And I would be unhappy to see Nature use it's prestige to muscle in a journal with more onerous access policies.
To be honest, I don't know too much about Nature Publishing Group, but what I do know is that the standard astronomical journal in America, the Astrophysical Journal (ApJ, "ap-jay"), is very well. It's owned by the American Astronomical Society (AAS) and published by the Institute of Physics (IOP) [1] which is itself a non-profit and does great work in education and other fields. They have a lenient policy where articles become open-access after 12-months.
My point is, they're not blood-suckers like Elsevier :) And I would be unhappy to see Nature use it's prestige to muscle in a journal with more onerous access policies.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOP_Publishing