WIKIMEDIA, PLOSNature Communications, which publishes brief scientific reports from a variety of disciplines, will now be 100 percent open access (OA), according to its publisher, Nature Publishing Group (NPG). “We want to be leaders in open research, and this move accelerates our commitment to drive open access forward,” said Sam Burridge, managing director for open research at NPG, said in a statement. “We are now taking a decisive step. We continue to see demand from authors for subscription publishing options, but we also see a need for a high quality, multidisciplinary, open-access journal.”
Launched in 2010, Nature Communications previously adhered to a hybrid model, publishing fewer than half of its studies as open-access articles and the remainder as subscription content. At present, researchers can choose an open-access option when submitting a manuscript to the journal, selecting one of three publishing licenses: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY), the more restrictive Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivs 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-ND), or Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-SA). Authors pay a fee of $5,200 to publish a study under a CC BY license, and $4,800 for each of the other two. As of October 20, CC BY will be the default license, with authors having the options of publishing under the other licenses without a fee difference, according to NPG. It ...
