Tony Delamothe, Fiona Godlee, and Richard Smith, Scientific literature's open sesame?BMJ, 326 (May 3, 2003) pp. 945-946. An important editorial from an important journal, advocating open access. Excerpts:
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.
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.
