All 18 open access journals owned by Nature Publishing Group (NPG), and two society titles published by NPG, will use the Creative Commons Attribution license CC BY 4.0 as default from today. All future open access journals will also use CC BY 4.0 as default.
Carrie Calder, Director of Strategy for Open Research at Nature Publishing Group/Palgrave Macmillan said: “We’re committed to driving forward open access, and the CC BY license is widely considered to be the gold standard as it allows maximum reuse and discovery. All of the open access journals we own continue to be fully compliant with all existing funder mandates.
“We had some wonderful feedback from the community after announcing that the fully open access Nature Communications would use CC BY as default with one flat APC price towards the end of last year, and we have trialled this with other journals to gather feedback from different groups. We remain committed to author choice, and other licenses are available on request.”
Nature Communications has used CC BY as default since October 2014. The other titles included in this initiative are:
- npj Primary Care and Respiratory Medicine
- Scientific Reports
- Scientific Data
- Seven fully-OA academic journals:
◦ Blood Cancer Journal
◦ Clinical & Translational Immunology*
◦ Cell Death & Disease*
◦ NPG Asia Materials
◦ Nutrition & Diabetes
◦ Oncogenesis
◦ Translational Psychiatry
◦ Ten recently announced forthcoming journals, including nine Nature Partner Journals and Cell Discovery
(* society-owned title)
NPG will also move to charging a flat APC fee, regardless of license chosen. More information can be found in a blog from Carrie Calder here.
