Fiona Godlee, The BMJ is evolving, BMJ, January 2006. An editorial. I can tell from the free online comments that the editorial explains why BMJ will reduce its OA content. But unfortunately, the editorial itself is part of the new regime and only the first 150 words are free for non-subscribers, at least so far.
Update. Here are some details I just got by email from BMJ, presumably sent to all registered users:
From January 2006, access to bmj.com will no longer be freely available during the first week of publication. However, the original research articles will remain freely available from the day of publication as part of our commitment to providing open access to peer reviewed research. Other selected articles will also be freely available where we feel these are of major public health importance. All other content will be behind access controls for the year following publication and will be available only to subscribers. For more information, [click here].
Update. I just got the text of the editorial. Excerpt:
Strengthening the research we publish means doing what all good journals are doing to attract the best research in their field. We aim to focus on research that will help doctors make better decisions. We aim to provide a great service to authors, offering speed, useful critique, and courtesy, and context setting if your work is published. And we need to shout a little more about our unique selling points for authors: our broad international readership in paper and online; our high standards of peer review and publication ethics; and our ability to give you as much space as you need on bmj.com while also providing a shorter, more readable, version of your work online and in print. In addition, uniquely among the five major general medical journals, we provide open access to all of our original research articles with free full text available online from the day of publication (although with the business models for scientific publishing in flux, we are keeping these policies under review). We also feed these articles straight to PubMed Central, the most prominent open access archive.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 1/06/2006 09:12:00 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.
