USCF Medical Research, Long Behind Journal Paywalls, Now Available Free to Public

Author(s)
Published on
May 24, 2012

"The University of California, San Francisco Academic Senate has voted to make electronic versions of current and future scientific articles freely available to the public, helping to reverse decades of practice on the part of medical and scientific journal publishers to restrict access to research results. The unanimous vote of the faculty senate makes UCSF the largest scientific institution in the nation to adopt an open-access policy and among the first public universities to do so." 

Read the press release on the UCSF web site. A similar effort is being considered for the entire University of California system.

According to Peter Suber, a researcher at Earlham College and open access guru, open-access (OA) literature is "digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions." A nice overview is on his web site.

What does open access mean to you, as professional journalists? It means, you can access the research behind the headline immediately and freely, even if you do not work at an institution that subscribes to a particular journal. Publishing excerpts from research studies becomes a less stressful endeavor: less fear of copyright issues getting in your way.

Tell me if you've used open access journals in your research, or if you've any questions about open access.