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Open Sesame? Increasing Access to Medical Literature

Senior Managing Editor
Pediatrics

Abbreviations: STM, scientific, technical, and medical • PLoS, Public Library of Science • AAP, American Academy of Pediatrics

The first 300 words of the full text of this article appear below.

Over the past few years there has been a growing concern within the world’s scientific communities about access to scientific, technical, and medical (STM) literature. This concern has given rise to a movement within scientific and medical circles known as the "open-access" movement. Over the last 12 months, this concern has leapt from the acid-free pages of the world’s STM journals to the newsprint of the mainstream media. Articles on the subject have appeared in The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Guardian, the San Francisco Chronicle, and The Chronicle of Higher Education, among other prominent media sources.^1–5 Many of these articles have painted open-access advocates as something akin to Ali Baba standing before the locked portal of a cave in which the highwaymen of publishing have stashed the plundered treasure of the scientific world.⁶ All one needs to do is chant the magic words and the portal will open wide. Although this makes for dramatic storytelling, the reality is far more complex.

	WHAT IS OPEN ACCESS?

 
Broadly defined, open access simply means that content is freely available on the World Wide Web without the need of a subscription or payment. It gets more complicated when one asks which content is freely available and when. For example, the Journal of Biological Chemistry makes preprints of accepted articles freely available on its Web site shortly after acceptance. To view the final revised, copy-edited, full-featured article, however, one must have a subscription. Is this an open-access journal? Many journals, including Pediatrics and the Journal of Biological Chemistry, make all content freely accessible after a certain period of time, usually ranging from 6 months to 2 years. Are these open-access journals? The answer varies depending on whom one asks.

Another component sometimes included in definitions of open access is the copyright . . . [Full Text of this Article]

Address correspondence to Michael T. Clarke, MA, American Academy of Pediatrics, 141 Northwest Point Blvd, Elk Grove Village, IL 60007. E-mail: mclarke@aap.org

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