Academics Andre's Research Biocuriosities Books Graduate School History of Science Hot off the Press Igor's Research Interdisciplinarity Molecule of the Month Open Access Philip's Research Philosophy of Science Physics Physicsworld.com
Backreaction Ceclia's Blog at PHD Comics Cocktail Party Physics Cosmic Variance The Daily Transcript Easternblot Everyday Scientist The Evilutionary Biologist Freelancing Science The Futile Cycle Good Math, Bad Math iMechanica in singulo Incoherently Scattered Ponderings Juniorprof Klara Stefflova Life of a Lab Rat The Loom Metadatta Mixed States Morning Coffee Physics Not Even Wrong Notes from the biomass Notional Slurry OpenScience Project Pharyngula PLoS Blog Ponderings of a fool Recombinants The Sandwalk SciAm Observations ScienceBlogs Scientific Clearing House Shtetl-Optimized Three-toed Sloth Uncertain Principles What's New by Bob Park
This week’s editorial in the journal Nature announces a move towards greater access for papers reporting complete genomes. Papers that report “the primary sequence of an organism’s genome for the first time” will be immediately available online but more interestingly, they will be released using a creative commons attribution-non-commercial-share alike license (similar to what we use for Biocurious). For more details on Nature’s licensing arrangements you can check the license information page.
Their reasoning is that this type of genome paper “represent[s] the completion of a key and fundamental research resource, describing and reflecting on what has been revealed but not usually providing insights into mechanism.” This makes perfect sense and papers reporting complete genomes are likely extremes in this sense, but even if a paper includes insight into mechanisms it doesn’t mean the work is done and that more access to its data wouldn’t still be beneficial.
It’s also noteworthy that Nature Publishing Group already publishes a freely available journal called Molecular Systems Biology that has also recently moved towards creative commons licenses (although authors still have the option of choosing to forbid derivative works). For a discussion of their decision (in response to this PLoS Biology editorial?) see the MSB blog.
Biocurious is written by Andre Brown and Philip Johnson, since 2005. Content of the weblog is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.
