Here's [0] a link to the rankings of nature journals. Nature Communications is 3rd in general science, and Nature is 1st.
Tim Gowers and the freedom of knowledge group are pushing hard on journal fees.
[0]http://www.nature.com/npg_/company_info/impact_factors.html
Old post :
I can speak to the reputability of your friend's program. The statement is jaw dropping. It is so wrong as to make it hard for me to believe he goes to an accredited university.
They published papers with fairly weak research for overhype many times already.
One example is the infamous Barabasi-Albert paper on the preferential attachment. It contains many false claims, bad math and extraordinary assertions that would be excusable in some vulgarization for TV, much less for a research paper. They could at least have upped the paper before publication.
There are many much worse examples, that you can find on retractionwatch.com among other places.
If you want to know why org. Syn. is so reputable, check out their description: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organic_Syntheses
A quick Google search found this:
http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/41072/...
"At present, researchers can choose an open-access option when submitting a manuscript to the journal, selecting one of three publishing licenses: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY), the more restrictive Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivs 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-ND), or Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-SA). Authors pay a fee of $5,200 to publish a study under a CC BY license, and $4,800 for each of the other two... Update (September 23): After this article was published, Nature Publishing Group's Amy Bourke responded to The Scientist, noting the flat article processing charge (APC) to publish in Nature Communications: $5,200"
Edit: other users seem to note that the journal is very reputable. I do not know myself, was reporting my apartment mate's reaction since he is much more knowledgeable in the area. It is clear from conversation I mis-understood his response. Apologies.