Publishing and technology company Macmillan Science and Education has announced the launch of a publishing initiative that will make it easy for readers to share an unprecedented wealth of scientific knowledge instantly with researchers and scientists across the globe.
Subscribers to 49 journals on nature.com can now legitimately and conveniently share the full-text of articles of interest with colleagues who do not have a subscription via a shareable web link on nature.com. In addition, Macmillan Science and Education will take a lead on opening up public engagement with scientific knowledge to society at large by giving access to the same content to readers of 100 global media outlets and blogs.
Subscribers to 49 journals on nature.com will be able to share a unique URL to a full text, read-only version of published scientific research with colleagues or collaborators in the most convenient way for them, e.g. via email and social media. Included are the world's most cited scientific publication, Nature; the Nature family of journals and fifteen other quality science journals. This new initiative will be available to scientists and students at more than 6,000 universities and organisations worldwide, and serve the more than 10 million monthly unique visitors to nature.com. This sharing is intended for personal, non-commercial use. To further aid collaboration, forthcoming annotation functionality will enable subscribers to share comments and highlighted text with their colleagues.
Additionally, 100 media outlets and blogs across the globe that report on the findings of articles published on nature.com will be able to provide their own readers with a link to a full text, read-only view of the original scientific paper. Thousands of high-quality scientific papers will be available.
The technology behind this initiative has been developed by ReadCube, a Digital Science portfolio company which develops software to make research literature more accessible and connected for researchers, institutions and publishers. Its publisher technologies have already been adopted by partners such as Wiley, Nature Publishing Group, Karger De Gruyter, Rockefeller University press and many others.
Nature Publishing Group has released content sharing principles and a new policy to support this sharing initiative, which will be refined based on usage and community feedback over a one year period. To follow updates throughout the pilot launch, please follow the hashtag #scishare.
