Nature Publishing Group will place genomes in the public domain

Scientific publisher Nature Publishing Group (NPG) , UK, has announced that it is introducing a Creative Commons licence for original research articles publishing the primary sequence of an organism's genome for the first time in any ofthe Nature journals.

The Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported licence will enable researchers to freely share and adapt the work, provided the original is attributed and not used for commercial purposes, and that any resulting work is distributed under a similar licence. No publication fees will be applicable, and the articles will be available free of charge. Nature Publishing Group has published first reports on many significant publicly-funded genome sequencing and analysis projects, most notablythe human genome, published in Nature in February 2001. Wherever possible, NPG will apply the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike licence retrospectively to original research articles reporting novel primary genome-wide sequences that have previously been published in Nature journals. Only original research articles publishing the primary sequence of an organism's genome for the first time will be offered to users under the Creative Commons licence.

Molecular Systems Biology, an open access journal published jointly by NPG and the European Molecular Biology Organisation (EMBO), announced in October that it will offer all authors the option of publishing articles under the Creative Commons Attribution -Non-Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported licence. All other articles published by the Nature journals will remain under NPG's existing licensing and copyright agreements. Under these agreements authors of original research articles retain their copyright, giving NPG an exclusive licence-to publish.

Please see NPG's press release dated December 5th, 2007.