Nature Publishing Group to license genomes under Creative Commons

OA Librarian points out a press release from Dec 5 2007 a news release from Nature Publishing Group announcing that genome sequences:
"Nature Publishing Group (NPG) announced today that is introducing a Creative Commons licence for original research articles publishing the primary sequence of an organism’s genome for the first time in any of the Nature journals."
Of particular interest:
"Wherever possible, NPG will apply the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike licence retrospectively [emphasis added] to original research articles reporting novel primary genome-wide sequences that have previously been published in Nature journals."

Nature Editorial: Shared Genomes (Nature 450, 762 6 December 2007)

It is good to see Nature trying to fill some of the leadership void in this area.

Taxonomy, with a longer history in publishing, needs a similar effort, as pointed-out by Donat Agosti on the Taxacom mailing list (in reference to the NPG announcement):
"In the year of the 250th anniversary of Sytema [sic] Naturae , our goal ought to be to get all our publishers together to agree to release all the descriptions, if not all the publications including descriptions with a creative commons licence. The loss of species is fundamental to our welfare, and thus at equally important as our genes."
Other viewpoints:

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