Open Access to Scientific and Medical Literature
For the last fifteen years, subscription costs to the world’s scientific and medical literature has risen far beyond that of general inflation, greatly diminishing the ability of libraries to provide ready access to this research. Over the last two years, a variety of organizations and initiatives have begun to develop new alternative publishing models to providing free access to original, high quality research articles. Two such initiatives have recently been launched in the biomedical sciences: BioMed Central and PLoS (Public Library of Science).
