Open Medicine: because health care information belongs to everybody

...cracks are beginning to appear in the academic publishing oligopoly, thanks to dedicated volunteers like UBC professor Anita Palepu, an internal medicine specialist at St. Paul's Hospital.

Palepu is the editor and one of the founders of Open Medicine, an open-access, online medical journal. Palepu already works long hours as an internal medicine specialist at St. Paul's, as a professor in UBC’s Faculty of Medicine (her research interests are urban health, addiction treatment, HIV/AIDS, housing and homelessness and quality of life) and as a mother to two young daughters. Why has she voluntarily added to her workload by editing an online journal?

She explains: “Most medical research, included that funded through the public purse, is unavailable to readers who do not have personal or institutional subscriptions to for-profit journals. The profit motive shapes the availability of research. But health care information belongs to us all: researchers, clinicians, patients, family members, and taxpayers. Why is most of it locked behind a paywall?”