Nature Opens Doors: All Papers Now Freely Available, Well Almost!

Update:

In a very obvious and necessary move, the 144 year old Nature Publishing Group has made all its 48 journal’s open access  free to access.

Through ReadCube, users will be able to read, share and annotate articles freely. Although ReadCube’s proprietary software does not allow downloading, printing or making copies of the papers. ReadCube is similar to a music streaming services such as Spotify that let you create libraries, but it does not allow offline downloads.

Institutional access will get access to papers from 1869, while individuals will get access to all papers beyond 1997. About 100 media outlets (we are not sure how this works) will also be allowed to share and re-post links.

Necessary Move

The move comes amid increased calls from the public for full access to research funded by government grants. Researchers everywhere have decided to shun journals such as Elsevier and even Nature because of their closed access policies. The move to open free access seemed like a ‘do or die’ act that made sure that Nature Publication Group stayed relevant for a few more decades or couple of years at least. Nature has to compete against other new Open Access journals that have popped up whose only value proposition is Open Access.

Update: Nature has clarified that it’s *not* open access since its journals do not come under Creative Commons Attribution CC-BY license. More on it here.