Scientific literature's open sesame?

doi:10.1136/bmj.326.7396.945

BMJ 2003;326:945-946 ( 3 May )

Editorials

Scientific literature's open sesame?

Charging authors to publish could provide free access for all

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

How could you make the results of the world's original biomedical research freely available to anyone who wanted them? Thisquestion remained hypothetical until the arrival of the worldwide web, which allows distribution of material at only a fractionof the cost of distribution on paper. But publishing peer reviewedoriginal research has some costs that the internet cannot magicaway. Recently, a way to meet those costs has become clear. Thegoal of original research being free to everybody everywhere couldbe veryclose.

Currently subscribers to journals, mostly academic libraries, pay for access to scientific information. In the new model,authors (or, more likely, those who employ them or fund theirresearch) would pay the costs of peer reviewing and electronicallydisseminating their articles. This one off processing charge wouldensure that the article was freely available to all, forever.Journals' estimates of how much this article . . . [Full text of this article]

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