The impact of digital dissemination for research and scholarship

Technological advances such as web-based peer review and powerful desktop publishing software have reduced the resources needed to operate a scholarly journal making it feasible for small societies or other groups of scholars to publish high quality journals without large capital investments. The transition to digital media has also largely eliminated the marginal cost of disseminating each copy of a research paper. Without an incremental cost per copy distributed, subscription fees are no longer the only practical means for funding scholarly journals. This has allowed what is generally termed open access (OA) publishing or making the material in scholarly journals freely available and finding ways other than subscription fees to cover the costs of operating the journal. The advantages of OA in cancer medicine are obvious.