Nature Publishing Group (NPG) has announced the results of a year-long trial of a content sharing initiative designed to support collaborative research. According to NPG, the trial has yielded positive results and on-platform sharing of the full text of nature.com articles will continue indefinitely.
The 12 month trial enabled subscribers to 49 nature.com journals to share the full text of articles with colleagues without a subscription, via a web link enabled by publishing technology company ReadCube. The trial was also extended to 100 global news media outlets and blogs so that they could provide their readers with full text, read-only access to the full text of scientific articles mentioned in news stories and posts.
High-profile media reports of Nature journal articles from a range of international media outlets drove the most traffic of the trial. The most popular article of 2015 was, “A new antibiotic kills pathogens without detectable resistance”, which was published in Nature in January 2015.
The most popular news outlets were the BBC, the Guardian, the New York Times, Science Magazine and the Washington Post.
NPG report that the trial had no adverse implications for subscription-based journals either in terms of institutional business or individual article sales.
More information here.