The American Physical Society (APS) is now giving all authors who publish in either Physical Review or Physical Review Letters the choice to publish their article as Libre Open Access. Open Access (OA) articles are article which can be read online without cost to the reader. Libre Open Access is when the article is not only available to read without cost but also available under a license which allows reuse. The APS is giving authors the opportunity to publish their articles as Libre OA under the terms of the least restrictive Creative Commons lisence: Attribution-only. This license allows others to read, copy, adapt, and redistribute the work as long as proper attribution (citation) is given. Physical Review Letters will continue to be a high quality and selective journal (about 25% acceptance rate) while simultaneously adapting to a hybrid access journal where some articles are OA while others are not.
This comes only weeks after Nature Publishing Group announced the launch of an OA only journal Scientific Reports. Scientific Reports articles will be made available under the terms of the more restrictive Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike license (or at the auther’s request, the most restrictive Attribution NonCommercial NoDerivatives license). Scientific Reports will be more closely resemble the most recognized OA journal in science and medicine, PLoS ONE, in that it will have a very high acceptance rate and publish only “technically sound” papers with less regard given to importance.
It is great to see both the American Physical Society and the Nature Publishing Group making the committment to Open Access by giving their authors the choice to publsh under a Creative Commons license.
MPublishing and the University of Michigan Library support Open Access on our campus through participation in the Compact for Open-Access Publishing Equity (COPE). Funds are available to assist University of Michigan authors when paying fees when they choose to publish in an Open Access journal.