Nature is introducing a Creative Commons licence for original research articles publishing the primary sequence of an organism's genome for the first time in any of the Nature journals
Nature Publishing Group to publish genomes using Creative Commons licence.
The Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported licence will enable researchers to freely share and adapt the work, provided the original is attributed and not used for commercial purposes, and that any resulting work is distributed under a similar licence.
No publication fees will be applicable, and the articles will be available free of charge.
The policy was announced in Nature, and details are available on NPG's License to publish page and in a policy statement published on the NPG press room.
Nature Publishing Group says it has been honoured to publish first reports on many significant publicly-funded genome sequencing and analysis projects, most notably the human genome, published in Nature in February 2001.
Nature has also published genome sequences of the Y chromosome, mouse, opossum, honeybee and chimpanzee among others.
"Nature journals have regularly published articles reporting novel primary genome-wide sequences without access control.
"NPG supports genomics community agreements that genome sequences should be placed in the public domain to maximise benefits to society.
"We now have the opportunity to formalise our position with the introduction of the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike licence for primary genome sequence articles published in Nature journals," said David Hoole, head of content licensing at NPG.
Wherever possible, NPG will apply the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike licence retrospectively to original research articles reporting novel primary genome-wide sequences that have previously been published in Nature journals.
Only original research articles publishing the primary sequence of an organism's genome for the first time will be offered to users under the Creative Commons licence.
All other articles published by the Nature journals will remain under NPG's existing licensing and copyright agreements.
Under these agreements authors of original research articles retain their copyright, giving NPG an exclusive licence-to-publish.
This licence encourages self-archiving of the accepted version of the authors manuscript, and is compatible with all major funders access policies, including NIH, Wellcome Trust, MRC, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, CRUK and DFG.
NPG is committed to maintaining consistency in licensing arrangements across its NPG portfolio.
Molecular Systems Biology, an open access journal published jointly by NPG and the European Molecular Biology Organisation (EMBO), announced in October that it will offer all authors the option of publishing articles under the Creative Commons Attribution -Non-Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported licence.
The Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported licence is available online via the Creative Commons website.
