...Starting with the December 2008 issue, all BMB articles are freely available online and deposited in a public archive immediately upon publication. Anyone is free to copy, distribute, and reuse BMB content as long as he or she credits the original author and source.
Dr. Mohammad Al-Ubaydli, a Senior Editor at the BMB, said “Open access publishing brings the same revolution to the publishing of scientific information that open source software brought to the creation of software”. Dr. Al-Ubaydli led the conversion of BMB to an open access journal. He is author of the book Free Software for Busy People, which discusses the use of open source software in health care.
This conversion is funded by grants from the Kuwait Finance House and the Ministry of Health. H.E. Dr. Faisal Al Hamar, Minister of Health, said “We supported this work because of its importance to medical research in the region”. Mr A. Al Khayat, from Kuwait Finance House, said “As an Islamic Bank we are delighted to provide funding for work that will ultimately improve patient care”.
Although some journals in the region already allow readers free access to their journal website, BMB is the first to allow readers to reuse the content in other ways through the open access license.
Such reuse has many powerful applications. For example, anyone will be free to distribute any article in BMB, make translations, put the articles into course packs in universities, and make derivative educational works. If a minister of health reads an important study in BMB, they are now free to send a copy to every health professional in the country....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 12/23/2008 11:27:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
