Scientific publisher Nature Publishing Group (NPG), has launched the first phase of its Manuscript Deposition Service.  The free service is expected to help authors meet NIH or other mandates for public access, and provides a convenient path for both compliance by authors and embargo period by publisher.  It’s an enlightened policy that should be good for all parties.

Here’s how it works:

1. Authors will be able to opt-in to the service as part of the online submission process.
2. Authors will be asked to complete a simple web form to select a funder from a list and provide further information needed by PubMed Central.
3. On acceptance, NPG will deposit the accepted version of the author’s manuscript, setting a public release date of 6-months post-publication, which is NPG’s standard embargo period.
4. PubMed Central will then ask the author to confirm the deposition and check the manuscript.
5. Six months later it will be freely accessible, meeting the open access or public access policies of all of the participating funders and making it simple and free for researchers to comply.
6. There will be no charge to authors or funders for this service.

The new service is available to authors who publish original research articles in Nature and the Nature research journals, and who are funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) or Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI).

NPG expects to be able to announce the availability of the service for many of its society and academic journals, and for the clinical research section of Nature Clinical Practice Cardiovascular Medicine, in the near future. The publisher is the first commercial subscription publisher to announce a commitment to deposit in institutional repositories, and we applaud them for it.

Read the full press release.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 4th, 2008 at 10:33 am and is filed under All News, Researchers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.