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

No they haven't

[Anonymous Coward]

You need a proprietary reader (just Windows and OS X). You need an institutional license if you want to access the older reports, and you need a subscription to access those going back just a few years.

Re: No they haven't

[Anonymous Coward]

Thats fucking retarded. Just offer a damn pdf like everyone else. Self righteous fuckholes.

Re:No they haven't

[quenda]

Sounds like more nurture than nature to me.

Re: No they haven't

[RabidReindeer]

Thats fucking retarded. Just offer a damn pdf like everyone else. Self righteous fuckholes.

Terry Pratchett wrote of grimoires in the Unseen University libary that were perilous. While you read them, they read you.

Now they really exist. Oracle keeps sending me such publications.

And that's not even counting the tattling that e-reader systems like Kindle, Nook, and Adobe do.

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.

Broken yet?

[J'raxis]

So is the DRM broken yet?

No? I'll check back in 10 minutes...

six-month self-archiving embargo remains

[Anonymous Coward]

"The article originally quoted Peter Suber as saying that the new programme eliminated the six-month embargo NPG places on authors self-archiving manuscripts in online repositories. The six-month self-archiving embargo remains, so this sentence has been removed."

ReadCube? Never!

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:ReadCube? Never!

[The Cornishman]

Yup, me too. But mostly because ReadCube is "available for both Mac and PC", i.e. no Linux. Bzzzt. Thanks for playing.

Re:ReadCube? Never!

[Chris Mattern]

How can folks be so arrogant

They're Nature. Along with Science, *the* leading scientific journal. They figure you can't live without them, but they can live without you. And they're right enough of the time to get away with it.

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.

You can often Google them

[umafuckit]

Often if you Google "ARTICLE TITLE" + PDF you will find a paywalled research somewhere. Researchers want their papers read and will often host them on their websites.

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: You can often Google them

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Of course, because we all still have IDs that will get us into a reasonably well funded college library, or local public library systems with the acquisitions budget to keep their journal subscriptions current...

Re:You can often Google them

[drinkypoo]

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

Use the personal approach. Google for the author, find out where they work, check the department pages to find their email address, email them directly. I have literally never been denied a request for a copy when I managed to locate an author of a paper.

Re: You can often Google them

[gwolf]

Yes, but that is far from enough.
What about authors who have passed away? Whom should I write to?
What about wnriching the globally available corpus of available knowledge? For the things I have written, I often grab tens to hundreds of articles, read a couple of paragraphs, and just casually filter them out. If it requires me begging to a third person, including the knowledge vested in that paper will not cross my mind – Unless, of course, somebody strongly points me at it.
What about long-term archival? What if said author lost his files in a hard drive crash last year? Freely accessible knowledge is lost for good?
Of course, it's better than having the journal as the only source for the knowledge (and them denying it), but it's not enough.

Re:You can often Google them

[wonkey_monkey]

I have literally never been denied a request for a copy when I managed to locate an author of a paper.

You might if we all start doing that.

Re: You can often Google them

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

The journal "Nature" is indeed very likely. The various Nature Publishing Group journals, though, are a much longer list and a much more expensive one; and some of those are also pretty prominent and likely to contain things of interest that Nature the journal doesn't.

Re: You can often Google them

[tibit]

I've yet to visit a regular US university library that requires any form of ID to enter to access the open stacks. Sure, if you need access to things from the non-open repository, you will need an ID.

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:Hopefully it collapses

[wvmarle]

Or they just stop the program and we're back to where we were...

Re:Nature Still on My SH*T List

[Anonymous Coward]

Really! I'm serious! I'm staying away from anyone with links to someone I'm mad at! And furthermore, I'm holding my breath, starting now, until they acquiesce. I'm serious! I'm not bluffing! One, Two, Three... I'm not kidding, Nature!!