Building on its established leadership in multidisciplinary publishing, Nature Publishing Group's (NPG) open access and interdisciplinary journal publishing programs are flourishing. The publisher says that open access, interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research are all essential to accelerate progress, aid collaboration and meet the needs of the research community.
For the second year running, three NPG titles dominate the multidisciplinary science category of the Thomson Reuters 2014 Journal Citation Report, with Nature, Nature Communications and Scientific Reports ranking first, third and fifth respectively. Nature Communications also appears in the overall top 150 journals for the first time.
Journal Impact Factors indicate citation impact at a journal level, and are calculated from citations of papers published between 2012-13. NPG titles performed well across the board, with 16 Nature-branded titles occupying the top spot in their categories, and Nature remaining the world's most cited scientific journal with 617,363 citations in 2014. Nature also leads the multidisciplinary sciences category for the seventh consecutive year, with an impact factor of 41.456. The interdisciplinary Nature Climate Change now has an IF of 14.547, and NPG has announced its plan to launch Nature Energy in 2016.
Impact Factors are useful broad measures of average journal citation rates in comparison to others in their subject field, but they have their limitations and other metrics are also important. NPG journals also perform well when using these alternative metrics. For example Altmetric measures the general and social media activity around research papers. Articles from journals published by NPG accounted for nearly a quarter of the Altmetric Top 100 of 2014, with 24 articles making the list. Over 10 million visitors now regularly access nature.com each month, up over 20 percent over the last 2 years, further demonstrating the value of NPG's content to the scientific community.
While maintaining its focus on outstanding research, NPG has been rapidly expanding its open access options for authors with encouragement from most of the world's science funders. In 2014 44 percent of the research published by NPG was published open access and in 2015 this has now grown to exceed 50 percent. NPG is the first major publisher to pass this milestone and is committed to expanding its open science options to better meet scientists' needs.
Multi-disciplinary Open Access journal Nature Communications now has an Impact Factor of 11.470, up from 10.742 in 2014, with 26,346 citations in 2012/13. It is now counted among the 150 top-cited journals in the world. Last year, a statistical analysis of the articles published in Nature Communications, carried out by the Research Information Network (RIN) found that open access articles are viewed three times more often than articles that are only available to subscribers. RIN also found that OA articles are cited more than subscription articles.
Scientific Reports, NPG's fastest growing open access journal which publishes original research that is technically sound and scientifically valid, achieved an IF of 5.578 up from 5.078 and is now ranked as one of the top-cited 500 journals in the world for the first time.
In addition, Light: Science & Applications, an open access journal published in China by NPG, received its second IF of 14.603. This meant that the journal climbed from #4 to #2 in the optics category – second only to Nature Photonics.
