Nature using Creative Commons license for genome papers

A new paper that just came out by friends and colleeagues of mine from my days at TIGR (Comparative genomics of the neglected human malaria parasite : Plasmodium vivax) reminded me I wanted to blog about how it is a good thing that Nature is using a Creative Commons License for some (maybe all) genome sequencing papers they publish (at least in the main Nature journal). They do not use the fully open CC license that PLoS/BMC use but hey, it is better than many other journals who claim they are making this “Open.”

The license they use is

“This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/), which permits distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. This licence does not permit commercial exploitation, and derivative works must be licensed under the same or similar licence.”

Too bad they do not do this for all the papers they publish. Maybe Chris Gunter can convince them to do that even though she is now at Hudson Alpha. I think when she was at Nature she helped convince them to do this for genome papers.

Author: Jonathan Eisen

I am an evolutionary biologist and a Professor at U. C. Davis. (see my lab site here). My research focuses on the origin of novelty (how new processes and functions originate). To study this I focus on sequencing and analyzing genomes of organisms, especially microbes and using phylogenomic analysis View all posts by Jonathan Eisen