Nature magazine makes all their articles free to view

Cannot see this anywhere on this forum yet.

Dont know if this is useful to anyone but Nature has ( 02 December) just made all their articles free to view

All research papers from Nature will be made free to read in a proprietary screen-view format that can be annotated but not copied, printed or downloaded, the journal’s publisher Macmillan announced on 2 December

a reply to: qmantoo

'Free to view' if you know someone who's a subscriber to their articles. Usually, this would mean university students and staff. If you had the ReadCube software, a friend at uni could send you a link and you could look at the paper. You wouldn't be able to copy or download it.

You can add annotations that (presumably) would be shared with your friend.

It might work that academic bloggers could add links to articles, but doesn't say so in the link. Not clearly anyway.

Doopity

My old public library used to have hardcopy editions of hundreds of magazines, all bound and ready for staff to find and deliver on a dumb-waiter system. Those are all gone now. Every magazine should put their total past publication run on the internet, imnho, for the sharing of human knowledge. Maybe this will happen someday, and certainly should.

a reply to: Kandinsky

I got excited when I read the thread title. There are so many papers on Nature that I would love to have access to. Unfortunately I generally have to settle for the Abstract because I don't have a subscription.

At one point I asked my local librarian if I could get older issues of the print copies of The Journal Nature. After spending an inordinate amount of time explaining what the magazine was, they told me "No." SImple as that.

Then I read your post and reality set in. Here's a quote from the article:

Initial reactions to the policy have been mixed. Some note that it is far from allowing full open access to papers. “To me, this smacks of public relations, not open access,” says John Wilbanks, a strong advocate of open-access publishing in science and a senior fellow at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation in Kansas City, Missouri. “With access mandates on the march around the world, this appears to be more about getting ahead of the coming reality in scientific publishing. Now that the funders call the tune and the funders want the articles on the web at no charge, these articles are going to be open anyway,” he says.

Yep. A public relations stunt. That's about it...


dex