In these posts I am trying to be as objective as possible in that I am investigating the provision of Open Access, “open access” and the consistency of a publisher. I am not being systematic as I have been sticking to chemistry and have been through most of the major “closed” publishers who publish single subject journals. I have not looked at Nature as they publish relatively little single-subject chemistry. However Maxine Clarke has posted a comment on this blog:

Name: Maxine | URI: http://blogs.nature.com/nautilus | IP: 194.129.50.189 | Date: July 16, 2007Hello, I declare conflict of interest as I am an editor at Nature, not in itself open access but our publisher has many open access projects and products. In response to Jennifer’s point: I agree that BMC has got an OA publishing/business model and indeed business, but the PLOS model is dependent on a large grant from a charitable foundation, so the jury is still out (in my opinion). As an editor I am concerned about the archiving and the preservation of the scientific record, for example.

I do not moderate comments (other than the 300 spam day-1) and am happy for Maxine to comment on Jennifer’s post. Jennifer can reply if she wishes. My current task will now be to find the “… many open access projects and products.” There is no obvious masthead on Nature pointing to Open Access and I am not aware of much activity about Nature Open Access on Peter Suber’s blog (or indeed from Nature). The best I have found is Jonathan Eisen’s blog:

Wednesday, May 23, 2007

Is Nature going Open Access?

Nature and EMBO are together publishing “Molecular Systems Biology” and all basic research in this journal is Open Access. I am wondering why this has not gotten more press as it seems Nature is experimetning with OA models here. Nature has done some experimentation previously by making certian types of papers available freely (e.g., many genomics papers). But this is definitely one step beyond and they deserve massive kudos for it. So if you are looking for a new OA journal to submit some systems biology related papers, you should try here. And maybe with a little effort, we can convince Nature it is worth doing for more of their journals.

PMR: and some comments:

Pedro Beltrão said…

I think because Nature did not yet realize that it would be good press for them to openly state it as an experiment into the open access model. Apart from the web publishing group (Timo Hannay’s group) things at Nature seem to move a bit slow.

5/27/2007 7:22 AM  

Jonathan Eisen said…

I am sure you/I would like them to move faster. But this is a good start. Better than many other publishers.

5/27/2007 7:38 AM  

Jonathan Badger said…

And to think the most absurd idea in your April Fools article was the proposed PLoN…

5/27/2007 8:30 AM  

Chris said…

This is also way more ‘open’ than many conventional publishers ‘open’ options as they are publishing under a Creative Commons licence: “This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. This license does not permit commercial exploitation or the creation of derivative works without specific permission.” Strictly speaking that is the Attribution Non-commerciual licence. This is almost (though not quite) the most useful/least restrictive of the CC licence. PLoS’s licence (the full Attribution licence) says: “This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.” Hopefully that distinction will never become important.

5/29/2007 3:35 AM  

Jonathan Eisen said…

It seems somewhat unnecessary for them to have used that particular CC license instead of the more open one, but I am sure they have their reasons. Hey, they are much closer than most other places …

5/29/2007 6:46 AM  

Chris said…

At the risk of being overly obsessed by this I checked over at Creative Commons and the MSB licence is actually the “Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives” licence which CC describe as “the most restrictive of our six main licenses, allowing redistribution. This license is often called the “free advertising” license because it allows others to download your works and share them with others as long as they mention you and link back to you, but they can’t change them in any way or use them commercially.” So only slightly better than ‘free-to-read’ and not available for repurposing such as translation to other languages, including parts in educational material, reusing figures from the papers, etc, unless you ask permission or place your faith in a ‘fair use’ defense. ‘Free Advertising’ isn’t ‘Open Access’ in my book.

5/29/2007 8:13 AM  

Jonathan Eisen said…

aargh … oh well, it was only a dream and in reference to J. Badger’s post above … I have no idea what you are referring to when you say “my” April Fools article. I just posted it. I would never have written anything so scandalous.

5/29/2007 8:22 AM

PMR: So here we are with apparently less-than-total-freedom. I am campaigning for CC-BY (== Attribution) as the mainstream scientific license and am still trying to find out how many of the “open access” chemistry journals are CC-NC or worse. Be quite clear, CC-NC restricts science. CC-ND is worse. It destroys the re-use of scientific data. Maxine I have only transcribed Jonathan’s blog. I don’t know offhand which other journals NPG or is it Macmillan actually publish. It’s quite difficult to find out. I appreciate the important and valuable experiments doen by Timo and colleagues,  and their use of Open Source (sic) code, but I’m more interested in these current posts in journals. So I’d be grateful for pointers to your open access products and the licences which they carry.

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