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