Nature releases genome papers under CC license

Papers about genome sequencing of several organisms, published in Nature, are now under a CC license instead of being accessible only to subscribers. According to Nature:

Although Nature and the Nature journals are built on a business model funded by subscribers and other sources of revenue, various initiatives have been implemented to enhance the accessibility of the research papers published in these journals.

They have long been freely available to researchers in the 100 or so poorest countries through the World Health Organization's Hinari initiative and others like it. Machine access is being enhanced by the open text-mining initiative of the Nature Publishing Group (NPG) (http://opentextmining.org). Preprints of original versions of papers can be deposited in arXiv (http://arxiv.org) and Nature Precedings (http://precedings.nature.com) without compromising their acceptability for publication. And final authors' versions of papers can be deposited in PubMed Central and other public servers from six months after publication. Authors retain copyright of their work, whereas NPG retains the licence to publish it.

Once more Nature shows its commitment to Open Access when it does not hurt its business model and its progressive attitude towards copyright. Publishers like Elsevier could learn a lot about Nature.