Nature Publishing Group (NPG) today launches the first phase of its Manuscript Deposition Service. The free service will help authors fulfil funder and institutional mandates for public access.
From today, the NPG Manuscript Deposition Service will be available to authors publishing original research articles in Nature and the Nature research journals. NPG expects to be able to announce the availability of the service for many of its society and academic journals, and for the clinical research section of Nature Clinical Practice Cardiovascular Medicine, shortly.
NPG's Manuscript Deposition service will deposit authors’ accepted manuscripts with PubMed Central (PMC) and UK PubMed Central (UKPMC). The service is open to authors whose funders have an agreement with PMC or UKPMC to deal with authors’ manuscripts from publishers. PubMed Central will accept manuscripts deposited by NPG where the author is funded by or employed by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) or Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI). UK PubMed Central has agreed to accept deposits from NPG from authors funded by any of its Funders Group: Arthritis Research Campaign, Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, British Heart Foundation, Cancer Research UK, Chief Scientist Office (Scotland), Department of Health, Medical Research Council, and the Wellcome Trust....
NPG hopes to extend the service to other archives and repositories in the future, to help more of its authors comply with institutional and funder mandates. This will include institutional repositories. NPG is proud to be the first commercial subscription publisher to announce a commitment to deposit in institutional repositories, and is currently in the early stages of the institutional repositories phase of this project.
NPG's License to Publish encourages authors of original research articles to self-archive the accepted version of their manuscript in PubMed Central or other appropriate funding body's archive, their institution's repositories and, if they wish, on their personal websites. In all cases, the manuscript can be made publicly accessible six months after publication. NPG does not require authors of original research articles to transfer copyright. NPG's policies are explained in detail [here].
PS: See my comments on the first announcement of the service earlier this month.
Update (9/18/08). Also see the editorial, Open access archiving, in Nature Cell Biology, September 2008 (accessible only to subscribers).
Posted by
Peter Suber at 7/30/2008 10:50:00 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.
