Nature Makes All Articles Free To View

An anonymous reader writes: Scientific journal publishers have been under pressure recently by both scientists and the public to relax their restrictive rules on the sharing of information. Now, Macmillan has announced that its Nature Publishing Group will make all research papers free to read. This will require the use of proprietary viewing software, but it's a step in the right direction. "Initial reactions to the policy have been mixed. Some note that it is far from allowing full open access to papers. "To me, this smacks of public relations, not open access," says John Wilbanks, a strong advocate of open-access publishing in science and a senior fellow at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation in Kansas City, Missouri. 'With access mandates on the march around the world, this appears to be more about getting ahead of the coming reality in scientific publishing. Now that the funders call the tune and the funders want the articles on the web at no charge, these articles are going to be open anyway,' he says. But Peter Suber, director of the Office for Scholarly Communication at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, says that the program is a step forward in that it eliminates the six-month embargo that NPG demands for free archiving of manuscripts."

Comments

Hopefully it collapses

[damn_registrars]

With luck the software they chose for this will place a high enough load on their webservers that they will eventually collapse under the load. Once that happens they will need to seek out a way to distribute the papers that doesn't reduce their servers to smouldering rubble; there is a good chance that situation will force them to just start letting everyone view the papers as regular PDF without additional software.

Re:You can often Google them

[wonkey_monkey]

Researchers want their papers read and will often host them on their websites.

Nature apparently restricts authors from doing so for six months (on pain of not getting their next paper published in Nature, presumably).

Re: No they haven't

[Immerman]

My kindle never tattles. I use Calibre exclusively to manage my ebook collection, and only transfer data by USB cable. Slightly less convenient, and it does prevent me from reading DRMed books, but hey, only idiots have ever claimed that freedom is free.

Re:ReadCube? Never!

[tlhIngan]

I'd be willing to pay money to not have to use that piece of crap.

How can folks be so arrogant to assume that a professional hasn't got her workflows up and running? We are't thrilled to get *your* workflow and *the other publisher's workflow* all of them pushed down our throats.

And we, the researchers, libraries and students are collateral damage of the turf wars of the platforms. Thanks, but no thanks. Go play bingo or blackjack in some casino, but leave us the fuck alone.

I'll take paper over this mess any day.

Then use the existing methods, they aren't going away. And if you really do need access to Nature (or Science), you probably already have institutional access that gets you what you need.

This stuff is more about the public not having to pay the $10 or whatever to get past the paywall and read the rest of the paper. You know, the people who don't have subscriptions to Nature.

Now they do. Funny how people can now have a free option to read the stuff and it's not "free" enough, when before they had to pay.

Sure it's not open access. But you know what? It's a step. Right now open-access journals have a reputation problem (see that paper that got published about a mailing list?).

For those who hate it - well, the situation is the same as it was before - you don't have access to the paper. For those willing to run through the hoops, you just got access to it, whereas before you had to ante up. That's progress.

And that 6-month rule has always been there, so no changes.

Sheesh, the way people react, it's as if yesterday's access was better than today. Because yesterday you couldn't get at the paper, but today you can if you run through some hoops.