Nature Publishing Group (NPG) is adding an online-only, open-access publication to its roster of scientific journals, the publishing juggernaut announced today (September 23).
Nature Communications is set to launch in April 2010, and the hybrid open-access publication will be the first online-only title in
Nature's family of journals. Authors will have the choice of submitting research articles to
Nature Communications via the traditional subscription route, or by paying an article processing charge -- the amount of which the publisher will disclose in mid-October -- to have their paper published as an open access work that can be licensed under a Creative Commons license.
In a comment emailed to
The Scientist, Steven Inchcoombe, NPG's managing director, cited increasing support for open access from research funders as a key driver for the endeavor. "Few could have anticipated the scale of upheaval in the global economy over the past twelve months," Inchcoombe wrote. "At the same time, scholarly publishing is on the cusp of yet more radical change with increasing commitment by research funders to cover the costs of open access making experimentation with new business models more viable."
A statement released by NPG concerning the launch of
Nature Communications contains a rather puzzling passage: The journal will publish articles across the scientific spectrum from biological and physical sciences to chemistry, the statement reads, which "will be of the highest quality, without necessarily having the scientific reach of papers published in
Nature and the
Nature research journals." Ruth Francis, NPG spokesperson, told
The Scientist that this means
Nature Communications will feature research that is more focused and less generally applicable than work that typically appears in
Nature, and the new journal will publish papers from "fields that aren't covered by the [
Nature] research journals."
Francis added that authors submitting manuscripts to
Nature Communications should expect at least a 28-day wait from acceptance to publication, and that papers appearing in the journal will be constrained to 11 PDF pages or about 3,500 words, plus supplemental information.
Nature has made some forays into open access in the past couple years, with a policy that makes papers announcing organismal genome sequences open-access and a move to deposit papers in PubMed Central six months after their publication on behalf of authors.
According to NPG's
annual letter to customers, which was sent out last week, the publisher is set to roll out more open access titles in 2010. "We plan to introduce several open access journals in our academic and society journal program in 2010, the first of which will be
Cell Death & Disease in January," Inchcoombe wrote in the letter.
Editor's Note (09/23/09): The original version of this story indicated that manuscripts submitted to Nature Communications
would take 28 days from the time of submission to be published. In fact, papers will take at least 28 days from when they are accepted by journal editors to be published. The Scientist
regrets the error.
Related stories:Online access = more citations
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[8th July 2008]Open access for Nature genome papers
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