There are signs that many of the traditional publishers are using some real creativity to evolve towards open access.
According to Jim Till at Be Openly Accessible or Be Obscure, the New England Journal of Medicine, a top-ranked journal in medicine with an impressive impact factor, is not only providing free back access after 6 months, but also up to 33% of content is free right from the time of publication. Why some contents are free and others not, we do not know; Jim has sent a letter to the journal inquiring about this.
According to Kumiko Vézina on OA Librarian Nature Publishing Group has announced that it is introducing a Creative Commons licence for original research articles publishing the primary sequence of an organism's genome for the first time in any of the Nature journals.
Peter Suber reports that Nature has also released another free online supplement, Proteins to Proteomes, sponsored by Pfizer.
This moves are wonderful to see. There is some real expertise in the traditional publishing community which will be more than welcome in our open access future, not to mention this entrepreneurial creativity to lead the way in the transitional period.
This post is part of the Transitioning to Open Access Series.
