Nature releases genome papers under Creative Commons licenses

Nature Magazine's announced that it's going to share all its human genome papers under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike licenses.The genomes themselves are not copyrightable and go into a public database, but the papers -- which are a vital part of the science -- may now be freely copied by any non-commercial publisher.

In the continuing drive to make papers as accessible as possible, NPG is now introducing a 'creative commons' licence for the reuse of such genome papers. The licence (see http://www.nature.com/authors/editorial_policies/license.html) allows non-commercial publishers, however they might be defined, to reuse the pdf and html versions of the paper. In particular, users are free to copy, distribute, transmit and adapt the contribution, provided this is for non-commercial purposes, subject to the same or similar licence conditions and due attribution.

In 1996, as human genome sequencing was getting under way, leading players stated: "It was agreed that all human genomic sequence information, generated by centres funded for large-scale human sequencing, should be freely available and in the public domain in order to encourage research and development and to maximise its benefit to society" (see http://www.ornl.gov/sci/techresources/Human_Genome/research/bermuda.shtml). These principles have continued to guide the field, and NPG has consistently made genome papers freely available in keeping with them. This new licence allows us to formalize the arrangement.

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• [pfh]

  Meanwhile, 99% of scientific publication remains behind ridiculously expensive paywalls.

  I always feel slightly dirty when I login through my university’s site license.

• [Crash]

  I look forward to seeing what sort of open-source projects might be undertaken with the human genome.

• [pfh]

  Crash: There is more open-source bioinformatics software than you can poke a stick at. The genome itself has also been downloadable for some time now. Grab yourself a copy here:

  ftp://ftp.ncbi.nih.gov/genomes/H_sapiens/

  Have a browse through the GBK files, which have gene annotations describing what is known about gene function. These are the product of a large amount of experimental work by researchers all over the world, and are being added to all the time.

  Anything involving actual biology, such as getting a microarray done or a genome sequenced, remains expensive, though this is changing scarily rapidly. See for example the new generation of short read sequencers, such as 454, Solexa, and SOLiD.

• [Chorske]

  Here’s hoping all scientific journals end up going this route. It’s ridiculous how hard it can be to access the ostensibly ‘public’ information in these journals. I’ve recently completed a meta-analysis in my field (biology) and despite having access to the subscriptions of four major research libraries, I’ve had to omit data from 6 major studies, simply because I could not access them without incurring major costs (in one case over $45 for access to a single article).

  As a Canadian, I’d like to see the Canadian National Research Council set the example by making their journals freely accessible online (I understand the need to charge a nominal sum for printed matter), but I’m not holding my breath.

• [Teresa Nielsen Hayden / Moderator]

  Good call, Xiguli.

• [Xiguli]

  I just like what a cool uncontextualized headline that made: Nature releases genome papers under Creative Commons licenses

  Go nature!

• [cank]

  As with most of these “open source” science publication stories, there is not a given example of what difference this will make. Are there really guys sitting in their garage working on human genetics who are a Nature article away from making a breakthrough? It would be one thing if all publications everywhere were free, but for all essential purposes, what Nature has done benefits their PR department and nothing else. Maybe some high school teacher can now pass out a paper that no one will understand.

• [cank]

  And a careful reading of the Nature release shows just how much Nature actually cares about making papers freely available:

  For many years, a more generous arrangement has been made for papers reporting full genome sequences…These papers are freely accessible on NPG’s website from the moment of publication. This recognizes a consistent character of ‘genome’ papers: they represent the completion of a key and fundamental research resource, describing and reflecting on what has been revealed but not usually providing insights into mechanism. Although some papers in other disciplines might also be characterized in this way, the fundamental character of the genome has led NPG to make a systematic exception.

  So they have made a systematic exception based on the unique aspect of these papers — that they describe something, but don’t reveal insight.