Publisher Macmillan has just announced that it’s allowing all research papers to be made free to view. This applies to the journal ‘Nature’ and 48 other journals Macmillan publishes.

Subscribers will be allowed to share articles and add comments and annotations, thus allowing collaboration between researchers and scientists. However, articles cannot be downloaded or printed. Reactions to the announcement have been mixed, pointing out that this is not open access as articles are not freely discoverable in a repository, while others say this is merely pre-empting the inevitable in the push towards open access driven by funders. For subscribers, this initiative allows immediate access to newly published articles, eliminating the previous 6 month embargo.

This has been introduced as a pilot project and Macmillan will evaluate it over the next 12 months.