Nature Publishing Group has introduced a Creative Commons licence for articles in scientific journal Nature that publish the primary sequence of an organism’s genome.
Nature already makes reports on genome sequences freely available for use by other researchers. The new licence formalises that arrangement, according to David Hoole, head of content licensing for Nature....
The licence being adopted will let researchers freely share and adapt the work, provided the original work is attributed and not used for commercial purposes, and that any resulting work is distributed under a similar licence. The licence will be applied retrospectively to genome sequencing articles already published.
“In effect, [genome sequences are] just large amounts of data, and we’ve always been in favour of open data, sharing, reusing and archiving data in relevant databases, so it just seemed like a logical extension of that approach,” he said.
Hoole added that NPG did not plan to introduce Creative Commons more generally: “It’s not a step towards broader use of the licence; it’s finding very specific applications for it and using it where it makes sense.”
PS: For background, see my blog post from December 6, 2007.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 1/16/2008 12:50:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
