“NPG supports reuse for academic purposes of the content we publish. We want the excellent research that we publish to help further discovery, and recognize that data-mining and text-mining are important aspects of that,” said David Hoole, Head of Content Licensing David Hoole.

Under NPG’s terms of reuse, users may view, print, copy, download and text and data-mine the content for the purposes of academic research. Re-use should only be for academic purposes, commercial reuse is not permitted. Full conditions are available on nature.com.

The re-use permissions apply to author manuscripts, of articles published in NPG’s journals, which have been archived in PubMed Central, UK PubMed Central (UKPMC) and other institutional and subject repositories. The terms were developed in consultation with the Wellcome Trust, the leading biomedical research charity.

As a result, the full text and metadata of these NPG author manuscripts will form part of the UKPMC Open Access subset of articles. “The Wellcome Trust was keen to expand the Open Access articles available on UKPMC,” continued Hoole. “We wanted to clarify the copyrights and terms of reuse for archived content, so that we could offer NPG author manuscripts for the UKPMC Open Access subset.”

“The Wellcome Trust is supportive of NPG’s efforts to make archived content more reusable,” said Sir Mark Walport, Director of the Wellcome Trust. “This is an important development because it shows that reuse can be facilitated, independent of business model, for text-mining and academic research.”

These articles will be accessible via the UK PubMed Central OAI service (UKPMC-OAI), an implementation of the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). NPG’s re-use terms will be included in the metadata of these archived manuscripts.

This development is the next step in NPG’s support for self-archiving. NPG’s License to Publish encourages authors of original research articles to self-archive the accepted version of their manuscript, for public access six months after publication.

Forty-three journals published by NPG offer a free Manuscript Deposition Service to help authors fulfil funder and institutional mandates for public access. NPG’s Manuscript Deposition Service will deposit authors’ accepted manuscripts with PMC and UK PubMed Central (UKPMC).