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