Open, Sesame

If in 2004, Nucleic Acids Research made an overnight switch from being a subscription-based journal to an open access (OA) one, 10 years later high-energy physics as a field will make such a shift when nearly 90 per cent of papers published in a dozen journals will become freely accessible.

The Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics (SCOAP3) has negotiated a deal with journals and is now coordinating with countries and institutions that publish papers in high-energy physics to complete the transition. It is one of the most dramatic instances of institutions and publishers embracing the concept to allow the free dissemination of scientific literature.

Open access has come a long way since the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) campaigned for free access in December 2001. Over the last decade, the relative share of OA has been steadily increasing by one per cent annually. So much so that about 12 per cent of scientific literature published last year was in open access journals; another five per cent of papers in subscription journals became freely available a year after publication, notes BMC Medicine...