Digital Science | Shaking Up Science -- Nature.com content sharing: action and reaction -- Timo Hannay

"There’s been a great deal of reporting and discussion about Nature’s sharing initiative, announced earlier this week.  Most of it has been very positive, for which we’re grateful, and some of it has also been unambiguously negative, which we also appreciate. After all, it’s only through open honest discussion that we’ll arrive at good solutions. There also seem to have been some misunderstandings about what’s going on, and I’d like to correct, or at least respond to, some of those here.  I’m thinking in particular of blog posts by Peter Murray-Rust, Jon Tennant and John Wilbanks, in part because I know and respect all of them, but also because I think they raise points of concern to other people too. First of all, this initiative in no way pretends to be, or competes with, or attempts to replace true open access (OA).  Since I left to set up Digital Science (DS), I no longer speak for Nature Publishing Group (NPG), but over the last 30 years I have variously been a reader, subscriber, author and employee of theirs.  I also remain a fan, and of course we at DS have collaborated with them on this initiative.  From this perspective, I’d like to point out that NPG has long been one of OA’s biggest proponents.  Since 2002 they have not required authors to transfer copyright; in 2006 they were the first commercial publisher to adopt a 6-month self-archiving policy; and since 2008 they have actively deposited thousands of manuscripts into PubMed Central on behalf of their authors.  Nature Communications was recently the first Nature-branded journal to go fully OA, and OA is now the fastest-growing part of NPG’s business, accounting for about 40% of their papers; they expect this to grow to 50% next year.  None of this will stop or slow down at all.  On the contrary, authors will go on publishing in OA journals and archiving their manuscripts in funder and institutional repositories in increasing numbers, and that is a good thing ..."