Nature Publishing Group joins OASPA

Nature Publishing Group (NPG) has joined the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA), a trade association that represents the interests of open access publishers in academic disciplines.

NPG publishes 73 journals with an open access option, and 38 per cent of the research articles published by NPG last year were immediately open access under Creative Commons licenses. Last month NPG announced that Nature Communications, the third-highest cited multidisciplinary journal in the world, is to go open-access only and will offer the CC BY 4.0 license by default, with other Creative Commons licenses available upon request. NPG also offers a liberal self-archiving policy, and in many cases archives manuscripts on behalf of authors.

Sam Burridge, managing director for open research at Nature Publishing Group/Palgrave Macmillan, said: 'Open access publishing models and policies have been at the heart of NPG’s business development and strategic thinking throughout the last decade, and in the past year we’ve made concrete steps in accelerating our open research programme. We are constantly striving to facilitate transparent, open scientific communication through data services, collaboration tools and public accessibility and reuse. We are delighted to be members of OASPA.'

NPG also publishes the open access journal Scientific Reports, which is the fifth highest rated multidisciplinary science journal according to Thomson Reuters, and Scientific Data, a new open-access, online-only publication for descriptions of scientifically valuable datasets.

Paul Peters, chair of OASPA, commented: 'I am very pleased to welcome Nature Publishing Group as a member of OASPA. Given NPG's position as one of the most well respected and innovative scholarly journal publishers, OASPA looks forward to working with them closely as they continue to expand their open access offerings.'