Virginia Barbour, James Butcher, Barbara Cohen, and Gavin Yamey, Prescription for a Healthy Journal: Take monthly, at no cost; reaches six billion, PLoS Medicine, October 19, 2004. Excerpt: "So in starting afresh, what should a new medical journal retain, and what should it ditch? Most obviously, we should throw out the old way of disseminating information. In today's electronic age, it is no more difficult, and it is only minimally more costly, to provide access to one million people than it is to one person. So the revolutionary idea of anyone being able to read any article is possible. This idea—open access—which completely challenges the old subscription-based publishing model, is the driving force behind the launch of PLoS Medicine. You can download and distribute articles without restrictions (feel free to make a thousand copies, translate articles into other languages, put articles into books—just give the author proper credit)....PLoS Medicine will not accept advertisements for pharmaceutical products or medical devices. Our open-access license allows free distribution of articles, so PLoS cannot benefit from exclusive reprint sales."
Posted by
Peter Suber at 10/18/2004 03:44:00 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.
