More on the benefits of OA for science and scientists

John Wilbanks, Another reason for opening access to research, BMJ, December 23, 2006.  (Thanks to Dean Giustini.)  Wilbanks is the Executive Director of Science Commons. 

Summary points:  [1] Authors should be prioritising open access to their works —for the good of other scientists and to ensure that the full benefits of the internet and advanced technology may be realised.  [2] Open access is rapidly becoming a mainstream idea in scholarly publishing, with more than 2000 open access journals and more than a million author self archived open access papers.  [3] Legal and technical barriers to open access are easily overcome using freely available tools.

From the conclusion:

Authors have several resources, including open access journals, open access archives, educational materials, and legal tools, that make open access easy and legal to achieve. Although open access has made considerable progress, and more scholarly work is publicly available than ever before, most peer reviewed articles remain closed to both human study and indexing by software. Authors, institutions, funders of research, and scholarly publishers should continue the movement towards open access so that no scholar is disadvantaged by his or her economic status and so that the full value of technological progress can be applied to the scholarly literature.