George Lundberg and three co-authors, Happy Birthday to Open-Access Publishing Pioneer MedGenMed: 5 Years Old and Counting, Medscape, April 8, 2004 (free registration required). Excerpt: "Medscape founded Medscape General Medicine on April 9, 1999 as an experiment to test whether an exclusively electronic, primary-source, peer-reviewed general medical journal could attract enough authors and readers to survive and contribute in an already crowded medical information field....Most medical research articles published in the United States, and many articles published in other developed countries, result from research funded by the government, often the US National Institutes of Health (NIH). We believe (and one of us [GDL] has argued for many years) that it is inappropriate for a reader in such a developed country whose tax money has paid for the research to have to pay again to read the results of such research by having to buy a subscription to the journal that publishes them. For government-funded research to be unavailable for application in the field of public health because of financial constraints seems particularly at odds with the intent of the US Congress in funding the NIH....Five years after MedGenMed was begun, our experiment can be pronounced a success....[C]hanges in the creation, packaging, and delivery of medical information brought about by the use of new technologies will only continue. And, when this information is properly used, authors, readers, the academic enterprise, and the public's health are the ultimate beneficiaries." (Thanks to Charles W. Bailey, Jr.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 7/30/2004 12:29:00 PM.
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.
