Opening up communications : Nature Communications : Nature Publishing Group

"Nature Communications has come a long way since our first submission five years ago. We have now published more than 5,000 papers, 2,000 in 2014 alone. Our editorial team has grown from just 4 to over 30 staff spanning three continents, and our expertise now covers the breadth of the natural sciences. This tremendous expansion, together with our growing recognition within the scientific community, would not have been possible without the trust of our authors and the boundless efforts of our referees and Editorial Advisory Panel, for which we are truly grateful. The journal launched with a ‘hybrid’ access model: authors could choose whether content was published for subscribers or as open access through the payment of an article processing charge (APC). This was a bold step for the Nature journals—a journal that enabled open access publishing while applying Nature standards of editorial evaluation and peer review was without precedent. However, the astonishing growth of open access content at Nature Communicationssuggested that demand was indeed high for a venue where rigorous peer review could be coupled with open access publication.  We are therefore delighted to announce that from today, 20 October 2014, all papers submitted to Nature Communications will, if accepted, be published open access through payment of an APC. The default publication licence is Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY). This allows maximum re-use and discovery of a body of work—in the full spirit of open access—although other licence types are available on request ..."