Providing realistic access

s and PDFs, which is full-text searchable and seamlessly linked to PubMed, is a free resource for the scientific community, and indeed to the world at large. It represents generations of the finest work in cell biology, and an unparalleled history of how our field grew from a curiosity to the most central body of knowledge in all of biology and biomedical science. It also demonstrates how the field progressed from being driven early on by a few pioneering investigators to the enormous efforts of an international community of scientists. The online archive is both a history of this evolution and perhaps even a guide to where this great field may find itself in the future. We hope that younger scientists and established investigators alike will take the opportunity to become acquainted— or reacquainted as the case may be—with the actual papers responsible for the development of cell biology as a distinct discipline, papers that were largely published in the pages of the JCB over the past five decades. There is an amazing amount of information in the archive that is still as valid and fresh today as the first day we published it. In the coming years, we hope to commission a series of articles to highlight the relationship of many historical contributions in the JCB to current problems and understanding. All of the older content is available free, based on our policy of making all of our content free 6 months after publication. This brief period of restricted access allows the JCB to charge reasonable subscription fees and thus spread the unavoidable costs of publishing, reviewing, and editing between authors and readers so that no single group bears an undue burden. We have also recently expanded the list of countries eligible for completely free access to all JCB and other Rockefeller University Press content. This group of 142 countries (see http://www.rockefeller.edu/ rupress/freeaccess.html) includes twice as many countries as are covered by similar initiatives at other journals. In addition, the JCB is available at a heavy discount to colleagues in an additional 13 countries (http://www.rockefeller.edu/ rupress/disconline.html). Charging subscriptions has enabled us to provide these and many other © Th e N ew Y or ke r C ol le ct io n fr om c ar to on ba nk .c om . services to the cell biology community. We continue to see this financial model as the only one that is sound and prudent for journals such as the JCB , which are published for and by active scientists as a service to the community, and not for profit. The alternative is open access, in which authors pay all costs upfront. We believe that open access makes sense for archival journals because operating costs are low (based on cursory reviewing), and a high acceptance rate means that most papers yield revenue via page charges (aka the open access fee). In contrast, selective journals (such as the JCB ) are of necessity high cost operations, producing a high quality product for which libraries on M ay 1, 2017 D ow nladed fom Published April 5, 2004