Manuscript Deposition Service
Nature Publishing Group (NPG) has launched the first phase of its free service to help authors fulfil funder and institutional mandates for public access.
NPG’s Manuscript Deposition service will deposit authors’ accepted manuscripts with PubMed Central (PMC) and UK PubMed Central (UKPMC). The service is open to authors whose funders have an agreement with PMC or UKPMC to deal with authors’ manuscripts from publishers.
PubMed Central will accept manuscripts deposited by NPG where the author is funded by or employed by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) or Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI). UK PubMed Central has agreed to accept deposits from NPG from authors funded by any of its Funders Group: Arthritis Research Campaign, Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, British Heart Foundation, Cancer Research UK, Chief Scientist Office (Scotland), Department of Health, Medical Research Council, and the Wellcome Trust.
The NPG Manuscript Deposition Service will initially be available to authors publishing original research articles in Nature and the Nature research titles. The company 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, shortly.
Authors will be able to opt-in to the service as part of the online submission process. If authors opt-in, they will be asked to complete a simple web form to select a funder from a list and provide further information needed by PMC and UKPMC. On acceptance, NPG will deposit the accepted version of the author’s manuscript, setting a public release date of 6-months post-publication. PMC or UKPMC will then ask the author to confirm the deposition and check the manuscript. Six months later it will be freely accessible. This meet the open-access or public-access policies of all of the participating funders. There will be no charge to authors or funders for this service.
NPG hopes to extend the service to other archives and repositories in the future, to help more of its authors comply with institutional and funder mandates. This will include institutional repositories.
