17 September 2009

Dear Colleague,

I write to share with you news of developments at Nature Publishing Group (NPG) and our plans for the coming months. I also want to detail NPG's ongoing commitment to providing value to the library community.

Few could have anticipated the scale of upheaval in the global economy when I wrote to you twelve months ago. At the same time, scholarly publishing is on the cusp of yet more radical change. Technology advances apace, and with it what our users expect; semantically rich, high quality content on demand, delivered in a format that suits them. Increasing commitment by research funders to cover the costs of open access makes experimentation with new business models more viable. With a focus on functionality and value, rather than bells and whistles, NPG is committed to continued innovation in our web offerings, our publishing processes and our business models.

Developments in publishing and web technologies mean that we can and should offer users better functionality than ever. We continue to invest to enhance nature.com and our publishing processes and technologies. A new XML repository for nature.com and other infrastructure improvements are the foundations for NPG to deliver a new wave of applications in the coming year, beginning with the much improved nature.com search we launched recently.

The increase in funder support for open access and enhancements in publishing technology enable NPG to undertake an exciting new publishing endeavour. In April 2010 we will introduce Nature Communications, an online-only peer-reviewed journal offering rapid publication for high-quality research across the biological, chemical and physical sciences. Nature Communications will have a mixed business model and authors will be offered a choice of access models for their research papers - either traditional subscription access or open access through payment of an article processing charge (APC). We plan to introduce several open access journals in our academic and society journal program in 2010, the first of which will be Cell Death & Disease in January.

Nature Chemistry, launched in April 2009, showcases the kind of innovative publishing functionality we want to provide. Highlighting chemical compounds in articles, redrawing chemical structures to be machine-readable and enhanced chemical compound reference pages created by journal editors, furthering the journal article's role as an integral part of the reader's workflow. These advances will be applied to Nature Chemical Biology, Nature and other NPG journals in the near future.

The positive response to Nature Chemistry, launching in a year of global recession, is testament to the value that our customers place on the editorial excellence and high quality content for which Nature-branded journals are known. The journal continues the strong performance of NPG's physical sciences journals; Nature Photonics had the highest debut Impact Factor (24.982) of any journal this year and ranks number one in both optics and applied physics subject areas. In 2010, our physical science portfolio will expand to include society publishing, as NPG will publish Polymer Journal with the Society of Polymer Science, Japan.

NPG now publishes 16 of the top 50 (32%) journals by Impact Factor, twice as many as any other scientific publisher. We are proud of this indication of the high quality of our journals, but were particularly honored this year by an award from the library community. Nature was named the most influential journal of the last 100 years by the BioMedical & Life Sciences Division (DBIO) of the Special Libraries Association (SLA). Five journals published by NPG featured in the top 100 journals, voted for by DBIO members to celebrate SLA's Centennial: The EMBO Journal, Nature, Nature Biotechnology, Nature Genetics and Nature Structural & Molecular Biology.

Alongside our longstanding reputation for quality, we are committed to fair and transparent pricing. In setting our pricing for 2010 we have consulted with our customers and our Library Committee. Last year we committed to cap price increases on NPG-owned journals at no more than 7% a year for three years, beginning with 2009 list prices. We also moved to protect our customers from currency fluctuations, by determining prices locally in each of the four currencies (USD, GBP, EURO, YEN). In light of the current economic climate, we have adjusted our price increases for the coming year. 2010 site license list prices for NPG-owned journals will increase by an average of 3.5%. Your local sales representative will contact you to discuss how this will impact your institution. In the interests of transparency, site license pricing for academic customers is published on the NPG Librarian Gateway (www.nature.com/libraries).

While we seek to limit price increases for the coming academic year, we are continually working to improve our journals. Subscribers will benefit from expanded content in Nature Medicine from January and significant improvements to Nature later in the year, with no commensurate price increases. Our cost per download analysis suggests that an NPG site license continues to deliver exceptional value for money. This year we changed usage statistic providers to MPS Insight, providing a much improved reporting service to help librarians monitor return on investment.

Since 2003, NPG has embraced the use of social media tools to aid scientific communication and discovery. This continues today, as we build synergies between user-generated content, article functionality and high quality content. We plan closer integration of nature.com and Nature Network, our social network for scientists. Article commenting by registered users will become part of their Nature Network profile, acknowledging that contributions to the scientific record stretch far beyond the journal article itself. In January this year we launched Scitable, an online learning service for genetics undergraduates and teachers providing a resource kit, high quality content, and social networking platform.

2010 promises to be a landmark year for NPG, as we continue to build our consumer media division with Scientific American at its heart. Scientific American became part of NPG in 2009, after many years as a sister Holtzbrinck organization. My colleagues and I feel privileged to be able to offer our customers the two iconic brands of Nature and Scientific American. We are looking forward to introducing institutional site license access to Scientific American on nature.com later this year, offering the functionality, support, services and interlinking with the NPG portfolio that you have come to expect from us. As we move forward, our goal is to become the authoritative and comprehensive science media group, from consumer to researcher, from London to New York to Tokyo.

NPG remains confident about the future of scholarly publishing, and wider science communication. We strive to be both responsible and fair with pricing and offer excellent value for money, while continuing to invest and innovate to meet the evolving needs of our customers. You remain our invaluable partners in this endeavour and we welcome your feedback. Please write to me at exec@nature.com

Yours sincerely,

Steven Inchcoombe
Managing Director
Nature Publishing Group

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