Scientific publisher Nature Publishing Group (NPG) has joined the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA), a trade association which represents the interests of open access publishers in all academic disciplines.
NPG publishes 73 journals with an open access option, and 38 percent of the research articles published by NPG last year were immediately open access under Creative Commons licenses. Last month NPG announced that Nature Communications, the third-highest cited multidisciplinary journal in the world, is to go open-access only and will offer the CC BY 4.0 license by default, with other Creative Commons licenses available upon request. NPG also offers a liberal self-archiving policy, and in many cases archives manuscripts on behalf of authors.
NPG also publishes the open access journal Scientific Reports, which is the fifth highest rated multidisciplinary science journal according to Thomson Reuters, and Scientific Data, a new open-access, online-only publication for descriptions of scientifically valuable datasets.
Nature Publishing Group’s sister company Palgrave Macmillan is already a member of OASPA, and Carrie Calder, Director of Strategy for Open Research, Nature Publishing Group/Palgrave Macmillan is a member of the OASPA board.
Palgrave Macmillan has worked consistently to implement open access models which work for humanities and social science (HSS) scholars. Early next year Palgrave Macmillan will launch their first fully open access journal in the HSS space – Palgrave Communications, which champions interdisciplinary research. Palgrave Macmillan also published the first open access monograph funded by The Wellcome Trust, and this year published their first open Palgrave Pivot.
