Scientific Reports, a Nature Publishing Group publication, is introducing the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license as an option for authors. The CC-BY license will be available to authors submitting articles on or after July 1, 2012, in addition to the two non-commercial Creative Commons licenses currently on offer. All content published in Scientific Reports is open access and is freely accessible to all, immediately on publication.
In 2011, 73 percent of authors publishing with Scientific Reports opted for the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-SA) license that permits derivative works, while 27 percent opted for the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-ND) License. Across all NPG journals with open access options, the picture was quite different. On the 1,113 open access articles NPG published in 2011, 39 percent of authors opted to permit derivative works and 61 percent opted for the 'no derivatives' license.
Scientific Reports is committed to publishing technically sound research articles quickly and efficiently. From June 2011 to April 2012, the average time from submission to publication of the final article, including peer review, has been 99 days. By comparison, over the same time period, the average time from submission to publication in PLoS One is 155 days.
All Scientific Reports papers are handled by an external Editorial Board of over 500 practicing scientists, and their support over the first year has been instrumental to the journal's success.
Hosted on the nature.com platform, papers are discoverable and widely read.
The journal publishes technically sound, original research papers of interest to specialists within their field. This includes papers that describe negative results. Launched in June 2011, the title covers all areas of the biological, chemical, physical and earth sciences. It has been accepted for indexing by PubMed and the Thomson Reuters Web of Science.
The CC BY license allows for articles to be distributed and amended, including for commercial opportunities. Papers can be developed upon, as long as attribution is given to the original work and its authors.
