Nature Publishing Group has introduced a Creative Commons licence for articles in scientific journal Nature that publish the primary sequence of an organism’s genome.

Nature already makes reports on genome sequences freely available for use by other researchers. The new licence formalises that arrangement, according to David Hoole, head of content licensing for Nature.

“Now Creative Commons licences have become more established we thought it was an appropriate licence to apply to something without access control,” Hoole said. “It’s a tidying up of the situation.”

The licence being adopted will let researchers freely share and adapt the work, provided the original work is attributed and not used for commercial purposes, and that any resulting work is distributed under a similar licence. The licence will be applied retrospectively to genome sequencing articles already published.

Hoole said the licence would not be extended to other scholarly articles published in Nature journals, because articles on genome sequences represented a very specific kind of paper.

“In effect, they’re just large amounts of data, and we’ve always been in favour of open data, sharing, reusing and archiving data in relevant databases, so it just seemed like a logical extension of that approach,” he said.

Hoole added that NPG did not plan to introduce Creative Commons more generally: “It’s not a step towards broader use of the licence; it’s finding very specific applications for it and using it where it makes sense.”
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