Open Access to Research Is in the Public Interest - PLoS Biology Editorial
Bevin P Engelward and Richard J Roberts
PLoS Biol. 2007 February; 5(2): e48. Published online 2007 February 13. doi: 10.1371/journal.pbio.0050048.
Excerpt:
With very little fanfare, American science will make a sizeable leap forward in the coming year—if Congress and the National Institutes of Health deliver on their promise for public access to medical research. As scientists—one of us a Nobel researcher in biomedical science and one of us a recently tenured faculty member at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—we may have much to celebrate for scientists of all generations.
As scientists, scientific literature is our lifeblood, because only by reading our colleagues’ work can we know where the cutting edge of knowledge currently lies and hence where our work should be directed.
Yet increasingly, subscriptions to the very journals that we must read are becoming too expensive—often in the thousands of dollars. The availability of the information vital to our research is needlessly restricted by the publishers of the scientific literature, who are mainly large commercial entities for whom maximizing profits is their priority. Fortunately, help is at hand. The big “if” remains whether this will happen.
read the full article: http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1796937
