Resources

Macmillan Science and Education Intros 2 New Sharing Initiatives

• By Joshua Bolkan
• 12/02/14

Macmillan Science and Education has launched a pair of initiatives to make it easier for users to share published resources.

The first initiative will allow subscribers to 49 journals on nature.com to share a unique URL to full-text, read-only versions of research articles with colleagues via email or social media. Intended for non-commercial use, the new sharing feature will be available to scientists and students at more than 6,000 universities and institutions globally, as well as nature.com's 10 million unique monthly visitors, and will include Nature, "the world's most cited scientific publication," according to a news release.

The second initiative will allow 100 media outlets reporting on the findings in nature.com articles to link directly to the full-text articles of the original papers. Thousands of scientific articles will be included in the initiative.

"We exist to serve the information needs of researchers, to help them in their work, and ultimately in making discoveries in order to improve the way we all live, said Annette Thomas, CEO of Macmillan Science and Education, in a prepared statement. "We have, over many decades, published a wealth of world-leading scientific knowledge through our family of journals. Today we are able to present a new way to conveniently share and disseminate this knowledge using technology from one of our innovative and disruptive divisions — Digital Science — to provide a real solution to the global problem of how to efficiently and legitimately share scientific research for the benefit of all."

"We know researchers are already sharing content, often in hidden corners of the Internet or using clumsy, time-consuming practices," said Timo Hannay, managing director of Digital Science, in a news release. "At Digital Science we have the technology to provide a convenient, legitimate alternative that encourages researchers to access the information they need and the wider, interested public access to scientific knowledge, from the definitive, original source."