Will allow researchers to share their findings in full, for free, and fast

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;

Where knowledge is free;

Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;

Where words come out from the depth of truth;

Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;

Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;

Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action—

Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

from Rabindranath Tagore's Gitanjali

This week we launch clinmed.netprints.org, an electronic archive where authors can post their research into clinical medicine and health before, during, or after peer review by other agencies. Resulting from a collaboration between the BMJ Publishing Group and Stanford University Libraries, it will allow researchers to share their findings in full, for free, and as soon as their studies are complete.

Articles will be screened for breaches of confidentiality and libel before we post them. After posting authors may submit them to any peer reviewed journal that will accept submissions that have appeared as electronic preprints. The list of such journals extends far beyond those of the BMJ Publishing Group and is growing daily (see box) Researchers who have retained the right to post their research results after publication in a peer reviewed journal can archive their articles here rather than on possibly more ephemeral institutional or personal websites.