Open Access News

Wide dissemination and visibility are the most important things for scientists. They would be happy for their articles to be photocopied or attached to e-mails and brought to the attention of everyone interested. Restriction of circulation is the last thing they want.

The problem lies in the traditional business models used. Nobody would deny that science publishing costs money. Publishers have to recoup their investments, so they impost artificial scarcity on the material they publish by forbidding unauthorised further dissemination. They use copyright to enforce that scarcity, even though it is not in the interest of the articles' authors. Not in science, at least.[...]

At BioMed Central we expect the research establishments, universities, and research centres, to foot the bill. They pay for research communication now in any case by forking out large sums for subscriptions and licenses. What we offer them is the opportunty to have articles peer reviewed and published for an amount to be paid by them, on behalf of the author, in advance, at the input side of the publishing process. We then set the article free from any constraints as to its distribution or use, thus doing justice to the real requirements of scientific research literature.

How could you make the results of the world's original biomedical research freely available to anyone who wanted them? This question remained hypothetical until the arrival of the world wide web, which allows distribution of material at only a fraction of the cost of distribution on paper. But publishing peer reviewed original research has some costs that the internet cannot magic away. Recently, a way to meet those costs has become clear. The goal of original research being free to everybody everywhere could be very close. [...]

This could be remedied if funding bodies earmarked just a few per cent of their research grants to cover article processing charges, recognising the costs of dissemination as a legitimate component of the total costs of research....Funders could go one step further and make open access publication a condition of funding. [...]

Surprisingly, another obstacle to the acceptance of the new model is likely to be academic institutions. While sharing the funding agencies' goal of achieving the widest possible dissemination of research findings, their reliance on journal impact factors as a surrogate for the quality of research protects the status quo.