reference searching tool, facilitates references to publications indexed by ISI Web-of-Science, the division of Thomson that computes the very impact factors mentioned previously.

Over the years, commercial STM publishing has become a cutthroat business with cutthroat practices and we, the scientific and academic community, are the naive lambs, blinded by the ideals of science for the public good—or simply in need of more publications to advance our careers.

Fortunately, a number of researchers and academic leaders woke up one day and said: “We do not need commercial publishers. We want the results of our research, which is often funded by taxpayers’ money, to be available for free to the public at large. With the Internet, the costs of publishing are almost zero, and therefore we can make this work.” And so was born the white knight of STM publishing: Open Access.

exponential increase in the scientific production in the medical (meD) and natural sciences and engineering (nse) fields. the vertical scale is logarithmic. the number of published articles for 2004 is about 500,000 and the number of references is about 10 million. Data provided by Yves Gingras.

100,000,000

10,000,000,
MED--
reference
NSE--
reference

1,000,000

100,000

10,000

MED- all-papers NSE- all-papers

1,000

1900

1920

1940

1960

1980

2000

open-Access Publishing

But the proponents of Open Access quickly realized that online publishing is not free, nor cheap. Management, equipment, and access costs add up quickly. For example, ACM spends several million dollars every year to support the reliable data center serving the Digital Libraryb and to incorporate new data, improve cross-references, and develop new services.

Since Open Access needs funding,
where can it come from?c An obvious
answer is advertising, but it is not a sus-
tainable option at least for now. A less
obvious answer, but one that is quickly
gaining momentum, is called author
charges (or publication fees): since
Open Access does not charge readers,
authors will pay to publish their works.
This should be painless for authors be-
cause they are also readers: it simply
transfers charges from subscriptions
to authorship. In fact, the proponents
of this model explicitly encourage re-
searchers to include author charges
in their budgets when they apply for
grants. The NIH explicitly supports
Open Access and accepts such costs.

b As an example, on Sept. 11, 2001, ACM was prepared to switch to a backup database in another location in the country to provide uninterrupted access to the Digital Library.

c See http://www.arl.org/sparc/publisher/in-comemodels/ for a fairly complete list.

d See http://www.plos.org/journals/pubfees.html
e Elsevier has admitted to creating fake journals
sponsored by pharmaceutical labs (see, for
example, http://www.the-scientist.com/blog/
display/55679/)