To satisfy many of the largest sources of grants in the biomedical sciences, including the National Institutes of Health, researchers must place copies of their published papers in free online repositories, like the NIH’s PubMed Central. That requirement is one of the successes of the open-access movement’s push to making research journals available to anyone, regardless of whether they subscribe.

Now a leading subscription-based journal, Nature, along with many of its offshoots, like Nature Cell Biology and Nature Neuroscience, have announced that they will offer to deposit authors’ papers in the repositories.

The journals will begin offering the service at the end of the summer, according to Tara Packer, head of author and referee services for Nature Publishing Group. She thinks the service will prove useful, she told The Chronicle, as several authors have already contacted the publishers for assistance with uploading their manuscripts to the repositories.

The Nature journals allow, and now will facilitate, archiving that goes public six months after papers are published. —Lila Guterman