Ulrich Pöschl, Open Access: Interactive peer review enhances journal quality, Research Information, September/October 2004. Excerpt: "There are many good reasons for providing open access to scientific publications (economic, educational, and scientific aspects). Some of the most important advantages of free online availability of scientific information are the opportunities for enhanced scientific quality assurance. Unfortunately, these issues are often neglected in discussions and reports about open-access publishing. The traditional methods of scholarly publishing and peer review do not live up to the needs of efficient communication and quality assurance in today's rapidly developing and highly diverse world of science. A large proportion of scientific publications are careless, useless, or false. Furthermore, they inhibit scholarly communication and scientific progress....The most promising way to substantially improve mainstream scientific publishing and quality assurance...is the implementation of a two-stage publication process, with interactive peer review and public discussion in scientific journals....This model offers an all-win situation for authors, referees and readers. Furthermore, its practical applicability has been successfully demonstrated by the interactive scientific journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics (ACP). ACP and its discussion forum ACPD (Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics Discussions) were launched in September 2001 and are published by the Copernicus Society on behalf of the European Geosciences Union (EGU). EGU is one of the learned societies that signed the Berlin Declaration on Open Access (click here for more information), and long before that it started to convert all of its scientific journals into open-access journals."
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.
