Sci­en­tific pub­lisher Nature Pub­lish­ing Group (NPG), UK, and the Amer­i­can Soci­ety of Gene Ther­apy (ASGT) have announced the launch of two new ser­vices to help authors com­ply with fun­der and insti­tu­tional man­dates for pub­lic access. Under the ini­tia­tive, Mol­e­c­u­lar Ther­apy, the offi­cial jour­nal of the ASGT, will now offer authors the option of imme­di­ate open access on pub­li­ca­tion, includ­ing depo­si­tion in PubMed Cen­tral, sub­ject to the pay­ment of a pub­li­ca­tion fee. In addi­tion, as a fur­ther author ben­e­fit to aid com­pli­ance with sev­eral fund­ing body man­dates, NPG will deposit all Mol­e­c­u­lar Ther­apy arti­cles to PubMed Cen­tral upon final pub­li­ca­tion, to be made pub­lic after 12 months.

Upon sub­mis­sion of orig­i­nal research arti­cles, authors have the option of pub­lish­ing their arti­cles as open access for a pub­li­ca­tion fee of £2,000 / $3,000 / €2,400. Open access arti­cles will be freely avail­able upon pub­li­ca­tion. By pay­ing this one-time fee, authors are also enti­tled to self-archive the final pub­lished PDF of their arti­cles on a web­site, insti­tu­tional repos­i­tory, or other free pub­lic server upon pub­li­ca­tion. Open access arti­cles will be des­ig­nated by the MTOpen logo in both the print and online edi­tions of the jour­nal and will be freely acces­si­ble via PubMed Cen­tral imme­di­ately after publication.

Open access arti­cles will be pub­lished under a Cre­ative Com­mons license. Authors may choose between the Attribution-Noncommercial-No Deriv­a­tive Works 3.0 Unported and the Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported Licence. The Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike Licence per­mits deriv­a­tive works, ensur­ing that authors can com­ply with fun­ders such as the Well­come Trust. Under both licenses, the final pub­lished ver­sion of MTOpen arti­cles can be down­loaded and shared as long as the author and orig­i­nal pub­li­ca­tion are cited.

Under the terms of NPG’s License to Pub­lish, self-archiving is encour­aged on all orig­i­nal research arti­cles pub­lished in Mol­e­c­u­lar Ther­apy. In all cases, the author’s ver­sion of the accepted man­u­script can be made pub­licly acces­si­ble six months after pub­li­ca­tion. This applies regard­less of whether the authors choose the MTOpen option.

Mol­e­c­u­lar Ther­apy joins The EMBO Jour­nal, EMBO reports and British Jour­nal of Can­cer, which already offer an open access option to authors. NPG also announced the intro­duc­tion of an open access option on ten fur­ther journals.

Knowl­edge­s­peak Newslet­ter, 26 Jan., 2009