When Is Open Access Not Open Access?

S ince 2003, when PLoS Biology was launched, there has been a spectacular growth in " open-access " journals. The Directory of Open Access Journals (http:⁄⁄www. doaj.org/), hosted by Lund University Libraries, lists 2,816 open-access journals as this article goes to press (and probably more by the time you read this). Authors also have various " open-access " options within existing subscription journals offered by traditional publishers (e.g., Blackwell, Springer, Oxford University Press, and many others). In return for a fee to the publisher, an author's individual article is made freely available and (sometimes) deposited in PubMed Central (PMC). But, as open access grows in prominence, so too has confusion about what open access means, particularly with regard to unrestricted use of content—which true open access allows. This confusion is being promulgated by journal publishers at the expense of authors and funding agencies wanting to support open access. Research funding agencies have been instrumental in driving the change toward open-access publishing. Many agencies now require the researchers they fund to make their articles freely available on publication, or within 6 or 12 months of publication (the most up-to-date information about such developments is available from the blog of Peter Suber, a leading scholar in the open-access movement [1]). The Wellcome trust, which has led the charge among funders, was also behind the recent launch of the European equivalent of PubMed Central (UKPMC; http:⁄⁄ukpmc. ac.uk/), a free digital archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature, which aims to mirror that created and hosted by the National Institutes of Health in the United States (http:⁄⁄www.pubmedcentral.nih. gov/). European funding agencies are already responding to this resource. Research UK all now require their grant holders to make their research articles available in UKPMC as soon as possible (and no later than six months) after publication. (Regular updates on open-access mandates and policies are available at http:⁄⁄www.eprints.org/ openaccess/policysignup/.) All these initiatives signal the ongoing transition from subscription-based to open-access publishing of the scholarly research. It seems we are fi nally witnessing a sea change in scientifi c communication. But with this welcome trend comes a more insidious one to obscure the true meaning of open access by confusing it with free access. As the original Bethesda defi nition makes clear [2] (Box 1), open access allows for unrestricted derivative use; free access does not. So the beauty of open-access publishing is not just that …