Author Archives: nature.com Communities Team

A recap of a successful year in open access, and introducing CC BY as default

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Guest post by Carrie Calder, the Director of Strategy for Open Research, Nature Publishing Group/Palgrave Macmillan

We’re pleased to start 2015 with an announcement that we’re now using Creative Commons Attribution license CC BY 4.0 as default. This will apply to all of the 18 fully open access journals Nature Publishing Group owns, and will also apply to any future titles we launch. Two society- owned titles have introduced CC BY as default today and we expect to expand this in the coming months.  

This follows a transformative 2014 for open access and open research at Nature Publishing Group. We’ve always been supporters of new technologies and open research (for example, we’ve had a liberal self-archiving policy in place for ten years now. In 2013 we had 65 journals with an open access option) but in 2014 we:

  • Built a dedicated team of over 100 people working on Open Research across journals, books, data and author services
  • Conducted research on whether there is an open access citation benefit, and researched authors’ views on OA
  • Introduced the Nature Partner Journal series of high-quality open access journals and announced our first ten NPJs
  • Launched Scientific Data, our first open access publication for Data Descriptors
  • And last but not least switched Nature Communications to open access, creating the first Nature-branded fully open access journal

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Content sharing is *not* open access and why NPG is committed to both

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It’s not an exaggeration to say that we’ve been overwhelmed this week with the response to our announcement that we are enabling sharing of subscription content on nature.com. We anticipated that people would be interested, and hoped some of our readers and library customers would welcome it.  We want to help researchers share papers they are reading, and our goal was to make that easier.

This initiative has been welcomed by many, but it has also raised some concern and confusion.  Digital Science’s Managing Director, Timo Hannay, eloquently captures our intentions, and deals with some of the issues raised over on his blog post.

One of the most discussed aspects has been about open access. Open access, and NPG’s support for it, is such an important issue that we want to definitively address it here.

So that there is no confusion:

  • Nature Publishing Group is committed to supporting open access, open data and open research
  • That commitment is shared by Macmillan Science and Education (our parent company) and our sister organizations Digital Science and Palgrave Macmillan
  •  The content sharing initiative we announced this week is *not* open access
  • We continue to increase our OA options, from Nature Communications and Scientific Reports to our new Nature Partner Journals and much more.
  • We continue to encourage authors to self-archive, in line with our policy, and to help them to do so

This is not a step back from open access or an attempt to undermine it. We see content sharing as an additional offering to open access, not instead of it.

We’ve been active in open access since 2004 (more on that later), so we know that open access is a lot more than something being free to read.  But this can be confusing for the uninitiated. What’s the difference between “free” and “open”?

There is no better explanation than Peter Suber’s overview. But briefly, an open access article is free to all immediately on publication, and forever, and allows reuse and redistribution rights. To many, “open access” means licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC-BY license. We offer CC-BY on all the open access journals and hybrid journals we own, and the majority of titles we publish on behalf of societies.

For authors and readers who want open access to research:

•       Nature Publishing Group publish 64 journals [https://www.nature.com/libraries/open_access/oa_pub_models.html] with an open access option (we publish just over 100 journals in total)

•       Our fastest growing journal is the open access Scientific Reports, publishing more than 7,000 papers to date in 2014

•       In 2013, 38% of the research we published was open access; we expect that to hit 50% in 2015

•       Nature Communications is to become our first Nature-branded fully open access journal in 2015

•       This year we launched Scientific Data, an open access publication to support open data and open science

•       We have launched more than 10 open access journals this year alone (including our rapidly growing Nature Partner Journals).

Authors can opt for a Creative Commons Attribution license on *all* our fully open access journals, and all NPG-owned hybrid journals

We have encouraged self-archiving of accepted manuscripts since 2005, and since 2008 have deposited thousands of manuscripts in PubMed Central on behalf of authors, free of charge. These are all in the PubMed Central open access subset, as we have licensed them for non-commercial text and data-mining. Where we do not deposit direct, we encourage authors to deposit their manuscripts in appropriate repositories as well as share the link to their research.

Content sharing is quite different – the 49 journals participating in this initiative are mostly available only to subscribers. We are offering something additional for subscribers at no additional cost, as an experiment, to learn how to meet the needs of researchers better. As Timo says, “everything you could previously do to access and share journal content you can still do today”.

We remain convinced that we are trying something new to help researchers collaborate, and provide the public with a way to read scientific content that has not been available to them before. We are very clear that this is complementary to, not an alternative to, our many open access and open research activities (in Boolean logic: “AND” not “OR”).

We welcome feedback and informed debate on whether this experiment is useful and interesting. We’re learning much from the criticism, although speaking honestly it is difficult for people here to see cynical motives ascribed to us, and our many open access developments disregarded in the heat of the debate.

We know that many people have read the Nature news piece on this topic. That is an editorially independent news piece, not an announcement. Our announcement is here. We have also published our guidelines, terms of use, and some videos to help explain.

Steven Inchcoombe, CEO of Nature Publishing Group and Palgrave Macmillan

Grace Baynes, Head of Communications, Nature Publishing Group and Palgrave Macmillan

The Unbearable Clunkiness of Sharing

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Timo_Hannay_70px Guest Post by Timo Hannay, the Managing Director of Digital Science 

This year marks the twentieth anniversary of my PhD in neurophysiology. Given the pace at which science progresses, this surely means that most of what is known about the brain has been discovered since I left that lab – possibly not by coincidence. It also means that I am, by some official definition, an old fart. So indulge me and allow a brief reminiscence.

When I were a lad – or at least, when I were int’ lab – reading the literature meant handling dead trees. Keeping up with the most relevant journals involved manually flipping through their pages. Retrieving a publication from the archive meant a visit to ‘the stacks’ – vast arrays of wooden shelves – and more often that not, a stepladder or two.  Building a personal library involved hour after hour of pressing down huge tomes against the bright glass panel of a photocopier and inserting a stream of 10p coins.  And doing any of these things at all first required a hike down the road to the library, and then back again to the lab.

Oh how times change. Little more than half a generation later we take completely for granted our ability to reach almost any journal article we choose – seated at our desks and in just a few clicks – and to search the corpus of published human knowledge in milliseconds.  How clunky and quaint those old ways now seem. Why did we ever put up with them?

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Investigating open access, citation and usage: what’s the advantage?

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Ellen Collins

Guest post from Ellen Collins, Research Information Network.

The Research Information Network is a small independent policy consultancy working on scholarly communications. We’ve existed since 2005 in various guises, working with librarians, publishers, research funders and academics themselves to understand how researchers want to find, use and share information.

Our aim has always been to create an evidence base that will help others to make informed decisions about the best way to support researchers. We’ve worked with a number of methodologies and techniques over the years to do this, qualitative and quantitative.

When Nature Publishing Group approached us earlier this year to undertake a brief and independent statistical analysis of usage and citation data for Nature Communications, we were happy to do it. They wanted a report that they could use to kick off a bigger conversation about what the data might tell us about open access and what this means for article use and citation.

The data about the 2,878 articles published in Nature Communications was easily machine-harvestable, and therefore fairly basic.  For every article published between the journal’s launch in April 2010 and the end of 2013 we were given its open access status (open or not), discipline, year and date of publication, Web of Knowledge citation data and, where available, Altmetric scores. For the articles published in the first half of 2013, we were also given the number of HTML views and PDF downloads, 90 and 180 days after publication.

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Nature Network becomes a community archive

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We started Nature Network back in 2007, as an experiment in using social media for science, and to provide a home for researchers to communicate with each other. Social media is now part of our day-to-day lives, and services like WordPress, Facebook, Twitter and Google+ now provide capabilities far beyond what was available in 2007, and what we built for Nature Network. These services evolve constantly, as technology and creativity make new things possible. Our site has dated and, like many social media services, has suffered from spam in recent months. We know that it is no longer fit for purpose nor provides the level of service that we wish for our users.

In 2012, we moved our bloggers to a new home at www.scilogs.com, where they continue to thrive as part of the Nature Publishing Group family. Scientific American has also fostered a lively network of bloggers over on the Scientific American Blogging Network. Nature Network has become primarily a home for spam, with discussions and collaborations happening elsewhere. We have concluded that we should close the remaining pieces of Nature Network to form an archive site, hosting our users’ past conversations and collaborations, but removing the ability to create new discussions. We will withdraw the Workbench, along with the ability to log into the site to update a user profile or post to the forums and groups.

We will put Nature Network into archive on December 17th. If you have a Nature Network account and wish to make any final contributions to the site, such as updating or removing your profile, we recommend that you log in before that date to make any changes. We can suggest several alternatives for groups and forums. You can also request that we deactivate your Nature Network account by emailing network@nature.com, using the registered email address and stating ‘deactivate account’ in the subject line.

Saying goodbye to Nature Network feels akin to moving out of the house where we grew up, and hosted some fabulous parties through the years. Bittersweet, but with happy memories and lots to be proud of – in many ways Nature Network was trail-blazing especially in the early days. We have learnt much from our 6-year experiment and we are building on that knowledge to develop new products and services to improve scientists’ workflow, and to help you collaborate and build your careers. In the meantime, we want to continue the conversation, making the best that technology has to offer us all today. Sometimes that will be here on nature.com, and often on third party social media websites. You can find us, and many of our journals and products, on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Pinterest. We host a number of editorial blogs and regularly run events like the SpotOn series to discuss the communication of science online. If you are looking for a dedicated social network for researchers, there is a vibrant and growing community on the Frontiers Research Network. Frontiers is now part of the Nature Publishing Group family – we recommend that you join us in the conversations there.

Nature Publishing Group’s sister business, Digital Science, now provides a growing suite of tools to help scientists make the most of technology in their workflow. We also want to continue to encourage researchers to build their own tools, and encourage you to check out our developers portal and our linked data platform.

Thank you all for your support and contributions to the Nature Network community.

Alice’s Analysis – And the winner is…

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The announcement of the winner of the Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books was preceded by a glorious evening of entertainment, brilliantly compered by the erudite and avuncular Dara Ó Briain.  All the shortlisted authors had made their way to the Royal Society, in one case from as far afield as California, and performed to an auditorium packed with science enthusiasts.

Proceedings kicked off with each author reading a short excerpt from his book and discussing it with Ó Briain.  Up first was Tim Birkhead, who entertained with extraordinary tales of bird sex, vision and olfactory bulbs.  He was followed by Sean Carroll, who speculated on what CERN might find next, then Enrico Coen, who talked about how humanity’s cultural achievements reflect our biology.  Charles Fernyhough came next, expanding on our ideas of memory and the complex ways in which we create them, and Caspar Henderson followed, touching on the history of bestiaries (Ó Briain described his book as the one that could be “best rewritten by monks”, much to Henderson’s amusement) and the wonder he felt for the natural world.  Callum Roberts finished off the readings and discussed how he believed the solutions to the damage done to our oceans were actually very straightforward, but implementation  would be much harder.

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Alice’s Analysis: Ocean of Life by Callum Roberts

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Over recent weeks, Nature’s Head of Press, Alice Henchley, has been reading and reviewing the books shortlisted for the 2013 Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books, at a rate of one every week.  The winner will be announced at a public event at the Royal Society on the 25th November 2013 during which shortlisted authors will discuss their books with host Dara O Briain.  Prior to the announcement,  we’re been running a competition on Of Schemes and Memes to win a set of the shortlisted books – the winner of the prize draw will be announced soon!

Ocean of Life - book jacketAs an authoritative overview of the sea and our relationship with it, I’d say Ocean of Life could be legitimately described as a magnum opus.  The breadth of subject matter covered is truly extraordinary and the writing is exactly what one would hope for from a popular science book: eloquent, informative, accessible (without being dumbed down) and personally relevant.  As well as being meticulously researched and referenced, Ocean of Life is extremely well illustrated, with numerous photographs, all with far more than just the odd desultory single line as a caption that so often accompanies such images.

Opening about four and a half billion years ago, Roberts describes the birth of the Earth and, from there, the formation of water and thus the oceans.  From this he plunges into the evolution of life, circulation of elements, explosion of species diversity and, finally, the massive extinction at the end of the Permian period.  All this features in the first chapter and each of the following 21 chapters is equally jam-packed.   Roberts moves onto the oceans as a source of food, from ancient times to the present, and the catastrophic impacts of fisheries over the last century or so.  He continues with a tragic catalogue of the wrongs we have done to the seas, from acidification to alien species (a list so extensive it is barely believable), and ways we might begin to put things right.

Unlike most of the books on the short list, Ocean of Life has a clear agenda. But this is no polemic and any anti-environmentalists should take note that they’re unlikely to get anywhere if they decide to take Roberts on. Whilst in another’s hands, the book could feel preachy, with Roberts at the helm it’s so well argued and backed up with such extensive examples and data, that it’s hard to see it as anything other than a rational set of conclusions. As the reader reaches the end of the book and the full extent of humanity’s impact on is laid out in its entirety, Roberts adds in some very useful advice for consumers. This guidance is very welcome, particularly if you realise, as I did, that your ethical purchasing may not be quite as sustainable as you had imagined.

This is one of very few books for which there do not seem to be enough superlatives. Vast in its scope and unwavering in its ambition, this is a truly extraordinary homage to the ocean.

 You can read Stephen Palumbi’s Nature Books and Arts review of Ocean of Life here.

aliceAlice Henchley has been Head of Press at Nature since the start of 2013.  Prior to that she worked at the Royal Society and the Zoological Society of London, communicating everything from population policy to conservation of the world’s most extraordinary animals.

Alice’s Analysis: Bird Sense by Tim Birkhead

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Over the coming months, Nature’s Head of Press, Alice Henchley, will be reading and reviewing the books shortlisted for the 2013 Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books, at a rate of one every week.  The winner will be announced at a public event at the Royal Society on the 25th November 2013 during which shortlisted authors will discuss their books with host Dara O Briain.  Prior to the announcement,  we’re running a competition on Of Schemes and Memes to win a set of the shortlisted books – all you have to do is predict the winning book and enter our prize draw.

Who has not, at some point, imagined what it’s like to be a bird, flying high above the cacophony of a teaming forest and swooping down to alight on the unsuspecting critters below? Well, perhaps I had not previously imagined diving on a scuttling vole or using a beak to probe about for invertebrates, but after reading Bird Sense, I certainly have.

Bird Sense UK jacketBirkhead opens with comical description of New Zealanders’ bird fauna and a quirky tale of catching the charmingly bizarre kiwi, before listing some of the most extraordinary experiences that different bird species may encounter in the course of their lives.  These range from diving to depths of up to 400m in the Antarctic seas to copulating for a tenth of a second, over one hundred times a day.  The mind boggles and, over the course of the book, many other examples are explored and explained, inspiring further mental gasps of surprise and astonishment.  Birkhead splits the content up into seven distinct chapters, Seeing, Hearing, Touch, Taste, Smell, Magnetic Sense and Emotions; each sets your imagination soaring.

 

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Alice’s Analysis: Cells to Civilisations by Enrico Coen

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Over the coming months, Nature’s Head of Press, Alice Henchley, will be reading and reviewing the books shortlisted for the 2013 Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books, at a rate of one every week.  The winner will be announced at a public event at the Royal Society on the 25th November 2013 during which shortlisted authors will discuss their books with host Dara O Briain.  Prior to the announcement,  we’re running a competition on Of Schemes and Memes to win a set of the shortlisted books – all you have to do is predict the winning book and enter our prize draw.

Cells Book jacketIt’s a pretty lofty ambition to explain how life goes from the simplest form to the most complex of societies, yet Coen works hard in Cells to Civilisations to get to the heart of the subject.  He kicks off by expounding on the principles that he believes can explain the complexity of life: population variation, persistence, reinforcement, competition, cooperation, combinatorial richness and recurrence. Unfortunately, it is here, I regret, that it becomes apparent that this is not my idea of a popular science book. The language is more like that of an undergraduate text and the analogies, which perpetuate throughout the book, seem often to be only tenuously linked to the theories that Coen is trying to describe.

However, as the book continues, I do find some chapters of real interest, and bearing somewhat closer resemblance to the other books on the Royal Society Winton Prize shortlist.  Chapter Six, for example, piques my interest as Coen describes how organisms deal with change.  This is a fascinating area and Coen chooses some great examples, including the extraordinary Mimosa pudica plant, whose leaves fold quickly together when you touch them, and the sea slug, a beast with particularly large and well-studied neurons that so fascinated Darwin.  Chapter Nine also attracts me, as it looks at the way we perceive and understand our world and uses the interesting example of an averaged portrait, made up of 179 portraits, including those by Rembrandt and Modigliani, to do this.  Unfortunately, these chapters, which explain the basics of neuroscience, do, to some extent, fall back to the kind of textbook prose that I was less enamoured with.

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On the road at #SfN13 – Tackling the terabyte: how should research adapt to the era of big data?

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If you’re attending the Society for Neuroscience meeting this year (#SfN13), join us for our panel discussion: ‘Tackling the terabyte: how should research adapt to the era of big data?

When: Monday, November 11, 6:30 – 8:30 p.m.

Where: Hilton San Diego Bayfront, 1 Park Blvd, San Diego, CA 92101  

Room: Sapphire 400

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