Nature journal makes all articles free to view

[Sean]

http://www.nature.com/news/nature-makes-all-articles-free-to-view-1.16460?

 

[Simon]

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.

The content-sharing policy, which also applies to 48 other journals in Macmillan’s Nature Publishing Group (NPG) division, including Nature Genetics, Nature Medicine and Nature Physics, marks an attempt to let scientists freely read and share articles while preserving NPG’s primary source of income — the subscription fees libraries and individuals pay to gain access to articles.

Looks pretty good to me - the annotation is essential, in my view, wheras copying or pringing I can live without.

 

[Valentijn]

Looks pretty good to me - the annotation is essential, in my view, wheras copying or pringing I can live without.

And if you really need something, there's always screen shots

 

[Snow Leopard]

So they're trying to push proprietary software onto us, as a way of avoiding irrelevance, with the changing of policy towards open-access of scientific publications.

Right now, many PDFs or Nature articles are freely available after 6 months.

Peter Suber, director of the Office for Scholarly Communication at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, says that the programme is a step forward. But, he notes, if authors prefer to share links to PDFs rather than actually deposit their manuscripts in an online repository, the programme could be a step backward, because repositories host copies independently from the publisher, and those copies can be printed or saved and are generally more reusable than a screen-only file.

If they allowed printing, then I'd be very happy. (but people would just print to PDF so...)