Open Access: The Alternative to Subscription-Based Medical Publishing

1 one of the world's first scientific journals, 2 the subscription-based journal has been the traditional model for disseminating scientific and medical knowledge. 3,4 Granting access only through subscription can place significant barriers to information sharing, thus putting research, teaching and patient care at risk. While the internet age has made information universally available, medical and scientific knowledge has proven to be an exception. Subscription rates to scholarly journals continue to increase annually by 8-10%, far exceeding inflation rates measured by the Consumer Price Index. Publishing in science, technology and medicine is a seven-billion dollar global industry 7 with publishers averaging 20-30% profit margins. 8 In 2003, the University of Iowa paid nearly 1.1 million dollars to Elsevier, one of the largest publishing companies in the world, and Cornell nearly 1.7 million. 9 The University of California libraries collectively paid eight million to Elsevier and 64 million for all their scholarly material. it is clear that we are in a crisis situation. One potential solution is the open access model. According to the 2003 Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing, 14 an open access journal must fulfill two criteria: 1) the author and any copyright holder must grant free access to the publication and a license to copy, use and distribute the work publicly, and 2) the work must also be deposited immediately upon publication to at least one online repository. While the concept of open access has been around for years, only recently has it gained traction within the scientific community. In 1998 the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) launched the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) with the specific intent of stimulating change to correct imbalances in the traditional scholarly publishing model. SPARC has advocated tirelessly for new methods of scholarly communication such as open access, launching initiatives and partnering with scientific societies with the intent of decreasing the costs of publication/subscription and improving scientific communication. The Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) in 2001 resulted in the Budapest Statement, the first such declaration advocating and defining the principle of open access. Illustrating the widespread growth of open access, over 5,000 signatories as of now have agreed with the principles stated in the BOAI. 17 drafted the Bethesda Statement, which has become the predominant definition of an open access publication. Similarly, the World Health Organization has taken steps to expand access to biomedical literature in Third World countries …