Hardin Scholarly Communication News

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) now offers an open access publishing option. PNAS authors may opt to pay a $1000 surcharge to make their articles available for free via PNAS Online http://www.pnas.org and PubMed Central http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov immediately upon publication. PNAS will offer this open access option as an experiment until December 31, 2005. PNAS will then continue to move toward an author-pays open access model, maintain the option in the same or modified form, or discontinue it. By introducing this option, PNAS strengthens its commitment to making the scientific literature more freely available than ever before, and hopes that its support of open access will encourage other scientific publishers to follow suit. PNAS will evaluate author participation and the financial impact of the open access option on PNAS revenue.

The open access option was approved overwhelmingly by the PNAS Editorial Board and unanimously approved by the Publications Committee of the National Academy of Sciences, which has oversight over PNAS. The open access experiment is PNAS’s latest initiative to promote the broad dissemination of science. Since January

2000, PNAS has provided free access to back issues online, and makes PNAS content free at both the PNAS Online and PubMed Central web sites 6 months after publication. Special features and papers from the National Academy of Sciences colloquia, as well as multimedia online supporting information, are available for free immediately upon publication. In addition, PNAS offers 145 developing countries free and immediate access to all journal content. Ranked by the Institute for Scientific Information as one of the world’s most-cited scientific serials, PNAS Online receives more than 1.5 million hits per week. The journal is a self-sustaining operation that is not funded by the National Academy of Sciences or the government.
[for the complete release: http://www.library.yale.edu/~llicense/ListArchives/0405/msg00096.html]