Image via Wikipedia Nature Publishing Group yesterday announced a new venture, very closely modelled on the success of PLoS ONE, titled Scientific Reports. Others have started to cover the details and some implications so I won’t do that here. I think there are three big issues here. What does this tell us about the state of Open Access? What are the risks and possibilities for NPG?

Towards the end of last year I wrote up some initial reactions to the announcement of Nature Communications and the communications team at NPG were kind enough to do a Q&A to look at some of the issues and concerns I raised. Specifically I was concerned about two things.

Nature Publishing Group (NPG) and the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) have announced that the prices for site licence access to The EMBO Journal and EMBO reports will be reduced by 9% in 2010, reflecting the increased publication of Open Access content in 2008.

A few weeks ago I wrote a post looking at the announcement of Nature Communications, a new journal from Nature Publishing Group that will be online only and have an open access option. Grace Baynes, fromthe  NPG communications team kindly offered to get some of the questions raised in that piece answered and I am presenting my questions and the answers from NPG here in their complete form.

A great deal of excitement but relatively little detailed information thus far has followed the announcement by Nature Publishing Group of a new online only journal with an author-pays open access option. NPG have managed and run a number of open access (although see caveats below) and hybrid journals as well as online only journals for a while now.

The full archive (1947 to date) of the British Journal of Cancer -published by NPG on behalf of Cancer Research UK – is now available in UKPMC. Current content is embargoed for 12 months, though articles routed through BJC Open are made available at the time of publication. The archive was digitised through the Wellcome Trust/JISC/NLM Medical Journals Backfiles Project.

Nature Publishing Group (NPG) have announced the development of a licence that will explicitly permit academic reuse of archived author manuscripts. “NPG supports reuse for academic purposes of the content we publish. We want the excellent research that we publish to help further discovery, and recognize that data-mining and text-mining are important aspects of that,” said David Hoole, Head of Content Licensing David Hoole.