Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Wednesday, January 16, 2008

NPG compatible with funder OA mandates

Alf Eaton, Depositing Nature articles in PubMed Central, HubLog, January 15, 2008.  Excerpt:

Nature Publishing Group journals don't submit articles automatically to PubMed Central, so don't appear on the NIH's Journals That Submit Articles To PubMed Central list.

However, as per the NPG author license policy,

When a manuscript is accepted for publication in an NPG journal, authors are encouraged to submit the author's version of the accepted paper (the unedited manuscript) to PubMedCentral or other appropriate funding body's archive, for public release six months after publication. In addition, authors are encouraged to archive this version of the manuscript in their institution's repositories and, if they wish, on their personal websites, also six months after the original publication.

See also the ROMEO page for NPG, which confirms compliance with all the Open Access mandates produced by funding bodies so far (though it doesn't include the new ERC mandate yet).

(BTW, the 'offprint request' bookmarklet works well on NPG article pages. Might be worth updating that to give more of a reminder to deposit articles in PubMed Central.)

Update.  Here are some further details on Nature's self-archiving policy, thanks to Maxine Clarke, Nature's Publishing Executive Editor:

When a paper is accepted for publication at a Nature journal, the author receives a letter of acceptance to confirm this fact and also that encourages him or her to upload to PMC/appropriate archive. This is a standard message that is on every single letter of acceptance for publication and has been the case for some years now.

See also our author and referees’ website  -- all authors are referred to this for policy guidance upon submission:

Contributions being prepared for or submitted to a Nature journal can be posted on recognized preprint servers (such as ArXiv or Nature Precedings), and on collaborative websites such as wikis or the author's blog. The website and URL must be identified to the editor in the cover letter accompanying submission of the paper, and the content of the paper must not be advertised to the media by virtue of being on the website or preprint server.

Our policy on the posting of particular versions of the manuscript is as follows:

  1. You are welcome to post pre-submission versions or the original submitted version of the manuscript on a personal blog, a collaborative wiki or a preprint server at any time (but not subsequent pre-accept versions that evolve due to the editorial process).
  2. The accepted version of the manuscript, following the review process, may only be posted 6 months after the paper is published in a Nature journal. A publication reference and URL to the published version on the journal website must be provided on the first page of the postprint.
  3. The published version ­ copyedited and in Nature journal format ­ may not be posted on any website or preprint server.

Posting of articles on authors', institutions' and funders' websites after publication is explained in NPG's license to publish policy.

And this:

When a manuscript is accepted for publication in an NPG journal, authors are encouraged to submit the author's version of the accepted paper (the unedited manuscript) to PubMedCentral or other appropriate funding body's archive, for public release six months after publication. In addition, authors are encouraged to archive this version of the manuscript in their institution's repositories and, if they wish, on their personal websites, also six months after the original publication. In all these cases, authors should cite the publication reference and DOI number on any deposited version, and provide a link from it to the URL of the published article on the journal's website (see publications A-Z index).