Macmillan’s announcement earlier this month that it is using ReadCube’s technology to allow read-only sharing by subscribers to content on Nature.com has generated LOTS of discussion. Here is a collection of just some of it. From the press release;

Subscribers to 49 journals on nature.com can now legitimately and conveniently share the full-text of articles of interest with colleagues who do not have a subscription via a shareable web link on nature.com. In addition, Macmillan Science and Education will take a lead on opening up public engagement with scientific knowledge to society at large by giving access to the same content to readers of 100 global media outlets and blogs.

There are also plans to allow for annotation of the shared materials, which certainly sounds like a wonderful way to facilitate collaboration and help publisher platforms to remain relevant by becoming creative and innovative spaces.

Is this fauxpen access as some have said (Peter Murray Rust for example) or progress in the right direction? Depends who you ask, but what is the fuss all about but many feel it is a step in the right direction. Mike Taylor’s thoughtful post about the announcement (with lots of links) acknowledges positives and negatives (the ephemeral nature of a non-printable document for one).

An interesting point, Mark Monakey, head of our Content Team mentioned is that if Nature can provide libraries with statistics on how often members of their institutions share articles it could be a valuable tool for understanding the broader impact of our paid content for the scientific community. Also, if the platform can provide us with how often our author’s papers are shared it would give us another metric of the impact of our community members and our community as a whole. This segues nicely with the question of whether this will be good or bad for altmetrics…which brings up more discussion in in the blogosphere.

Timo Hannay took questions in a reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything) which you can read here (heads up, academic publishing is a hot button issue on reddit and there may be some strong language in the comments).