Michael Clarke, Open Sesame? Increasing Access to Medical Literature, Pediatrics, July 2004. An editorial announcing the journal's new OA policy. Excerpt: "Beginning in July 2004, however, Pediatrics will allow the authors of any accepted manuscript to elect to have their article published in the Electronic Pages [the journal's OA subset, formerly limited to editor-selected articles, OA since 1997]. Their article will be freely accessible on the journal’s Web site immediately upon publication and they will pay no author fees. In addition to the content in the Electronic Pages, all policy statements, clinical reports, clinical practice guidelines, and technical reports of the Academy are made freely available the moment they are published. Furthermore, beginning in July 2004, access to all articles published in Pediatrics will be free 1 year after publication."
Three quick comments. (1) We learn another important detail about the new Pediatrics OA policy from Greg McConnell's article in yesterday's issue of American Academy of Pediatrics News. Authors who choose OA pay no fees, but their articles will not appear in the print edition of the journal. (2) Pediatrics is published by the American Academy of Pediatrics, which has signed the DC Principles. (3) Clarke's editorial misunderstands OA on one point. He assumes that OA is a business model. It isn't; it's a form of online access compatible with many different business models. Because he rejects the (misnamed) "author pays" business model, he thinks he's rejecting OA. He's not. When authors choose the new option offered by Pediatrics, the journal will provide true OA to those articles. I congratulate Pediatrics for offering this form of OA and for finding a way to do it without charging processing fees. I just hope that it starts to appreciate that the goal of OA can be reached by many different paths.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 7/02/2004 08:40:00 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.
