Endorsement of OA journals from India's Public Health Foundation

Open access electronic journal gaining acceptance, The Hindu, August 27, 2006. Excerpt:

The open access electronic journal is an indication of how science communication will shape up in the 21st century, K. Srinath Reddy, president, Public Health Foundation of India, said on Saturday.

Delivering the fourth M. V. Arunachalam endowment lecture on 'Medical and scientific journalism-A 21st century perspective,' he pointed out that the open access format was gaining wide acceptance as opposed to the user-paid mode of accessing scientific journals.

The open access format, whose advocates include even the United Nations, could become an important tool in people's empowerment and straightening out the asymmetry of knowledge in the doctor-patient relationship....

Among the advantages of the printed journal...the most important attribute was the process of pre-publication peer review that lent authenticity to the scientific literature. The absence of gate-keeping to uphold the integrity of science was also the big drawback held against electronic publishing, he said....

Comment. Surely Reddy knows that OA journals perform peer review. Is it possible that the paper misunderstood a point he was making about preprint repositories?  As of today the DOAJ lists 2,350 open access peer-reviewed journals.

Update. An August 28 story on Reddy's talk, from South India's News Today, suggests that when Reddy discussed the absence of peer review, he was talking about preprint exchanges, not OA journals.