Hybrid journals at Nature Publishing Group

COASP19th September, 2013

James Butcher PhDAssociate Director

Open Publishing

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OA at NPG

• 61 NPG journals are fully OA or have an OA option– NPG will publish ~5000 OA papers in 2013 (not including Frontiers)

• 46 are hybrid OA journals– ~1300 OA articles in 2013

• ~800 will be published in 45 journals (~5% uptake)• ~500 will be published in Nature Communications (~30% uptake)

• 15 journals are fully OA– ~3700 OA articles in 2013

• ~1200 in 14 specialist fully OA journals• ~2500 in Scientific Reports

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Nature Communications

• Launched in April 2010

• Scope: all areas of the natural sciences

• Authors can choose subscription or OA at acceptance

• ~20% accept rate

• In-house editorial team

• Offers three Creative Commons licenses– CC BY ($5200)– CC BY-NC-ND ($4800)– CC BY-NC-SA ($4800)

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Submissions

• Received ~20,000 submissions since launch

• The journal received ~1200 submissions in August 2013; (Nature receives ~900 / month)

• ~33% of submissions were previously considered at another Nature journal

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The editorial team has grown…

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The editorial team has grown…

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Publications

• Published 701 papers in 2012• Expect to publish ~1600 papers in

2013, of which ~500 will be OA• In 2012, the 16 Nature Research

Journals published ~2100 papers

• 53% biology• 33% physics• 11% chemistry• 3% earth and environmental sciences

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OA uptake rate

• In 2012, 41% of authors chose OA• In 2013, 31% of authors chose OA

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• OA uptake rate varies by subject• In 2013:

– 39% of biologists chose OA– 34% of physicists chose OA– 23% of earth scientists chose OA– 22% of chemists chose OA

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Licenses

• We started to offer CC BY in April, 2013• Since then, ~25% of OA authors have

chosen CC BY• The uptake of CC BY-NC-ND has not

changed; it looks as though some of the CC BY-NC-SA authors have moved to CC BY

• 35% of authors choose the most restrictive license

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OASPA membership

• NPG does not qualify for membership of OASPA because we offer SA and ND licenses on all our OA journals.

• However, 75% of our authors choose these licenses.

• Should publishing companies dictate license terms to authors?

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1 July 2012 – 7 Nov 2012

• We started to offer CC-BY on July 1 • Published ~230 papers• Order of the license on the form was:

– SA– ND– BY

• Were more authors choosing ND because it was the middle option?

An aside: license choice (Scientific Reports)

June 2011 – July 2012

• Published 618 papers• 72% were CC-BY-NC-SA• 28% were CC-BY-NC-ND

CC BY-NC-NDCC BY-NC-SA

Next 3 weeks

• Changed the order on the form to:– ND– SA– BY

• 36 authors chose a license in the following 3 week period:

CC BY

CC BY-NC-ND

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CC BY

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MetricsWeb traffic

• 5.5m page views in 2012• 7.2m page views in Jan to Aug 2013

Impact factor

• The 2012 impact factor is 10.015 • ~150 journals (out of 8500) have an IF >10

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Unanswered questions

• Are open access articles cited more than subscription articles?• Does this vary by subject area?

• Are open access articles viewed more than subscription articles?

• Is there a correlation between page views and citations?

• We are looking for a statistician to independently analyse this data set. Recommendations welcome.

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NPG does not “double dip”

• Nature Publishing Group has published its hybrid journal site license pricing policy.

• Under this policy, any price adjustments for 2014 (for example) are based on the year-on-year change in subscription content published in 2011 and 2012.

• For example • In 2011 Journal X publishes 100 subscription papers• In 2012 Journal X starts to offer OA as hybrid option• In 2012 Journal X publishes 80 subscription papers and 20 OA papers• Therefore the price in 2014 would decrease by 20%

• However, at the request of our librarian panel, the price will not change unless the % change (either up or down) is >10%