Nature Publishing Group Moves to CC BY 4.0 as Default For Open Access Journals
From NPG:
All 18 open access journals owned by Nature Publishing Group (NPG), and two society titles published by NPG, will use the Creative Commons Attribution license CC BY 4.0 as default from today. All future open access journals will also use CC BY 4.0 as default.
Carrie Calder, Director of Strategy for Open Research at Nature Publishing Group/Palgrave Macmillan said: “We’re committed to driving forward open access, and the CC BY license is widely considered to be the gold standard as it allows maximum reuse and discovery. All of the open access journals we own continue to be fully compliant with all existing funder mandates.
“We had some wonderful feedback from the community after announcing that the fully open access Nature Communications would use CC BY as default with one flat APC price towards the end of last year, and we have trialled this with other journals to gather feedback from different groups. We remain committed to author choice, and other licenses are available on request.”
Nature Communications has used CC BY as default since October 2014. The other titles included in this initiative are:
- npj Primary Care and Respiratory Medicine
- Scientific Reports
- Scientific Data
- Seven fully-OA academic journals:
◦ Blood Cancer Journal
◦ Clinical & Translational Immunology*
◦ Cell Death & Disease*
◦ NPG Asia Materials
◦ Nutrition & Diabetes
◦ Oncogenesis
◦ Translational Psychiatry
◦ Ten recently announced forthcoming journals, including nine Nature Partner Journals and Cell Discovery(* society-owned title)
NPG will also move to charging a flat APC fee, regardless of license chosen. More information can be found in a blog from Carrie Calder here.
Calder’s post includes some statistics:
In 2013, 38% of our authors chose to publish open access immediately upon publication – in 2014, this percentage rose to 44%. Both Scientific Reports and Nature Communications had record years in terms of submissions for publication.
Filed under: Academic Libraries, Data Files, Open Access, Publishing, Reports
About Gary Price
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area. He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit. Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com.