After speaking at a recent conference, Nature Medicine’s Editor Juan Carlos Lopez writes on Spoonful of Medicine, “It was fascinating to see how difficult it was for some people to understand that scientific publishing costs money, and that there are different models to recover your costs — the author-pays model, the subscription model and everything in between … publishing groups ought to choose the model that works best for each of them. In our case, the subscription-based model is the only one that seems viable for the time being. How difficult is it to get this point?”
NPG’s licence policy is consistent with a newly issued requirement by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) that authors self-archive published research that the NIH has funded: “When a manuscript is accepted for publication in an NPG journal, authors are encouraged to submit the author’s version of the accepted paper (the unedited manuscript) to PubMedCentral or other appropriate funding body’s archive, for public release six months after publication.”
Nature 452, x; 24 April 2008