1. The author(s) and copyright holder(s) grant(s) to all users a free, irrevocable, worldwide, perpetual right of access to, and a license to copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works, in any digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship[2], as well as the right to make small numbers of printed copies for their personal use.
2. A complete version of the work and all supplemental materials, including a copy of the permission as stated above, in a suitable standard electronic format is deposited immediately upon initial publication in at least one online repository that is supported by an academic institution, scholarly society, government agency, or other well-established organization that seeks to enable open access, unrestricted distribution, interoperability, and long-term archiving (for the biomedical sciences, PubMed Central is such a repository).

1. Open access is a property of individual works, not necessarily journals or publishers.
2. Community standards, rather than copyright law, will continue to provide the mechanism for enforcement of proper attribution and responsible use of the published work, as they do now.

• Scientists and scholars are willing to publish the fruits of their research in scholarly journals without payment, for the sake of inquiry and knowledge.[1]
• There is growing public interest in information about science and the way that public funds are used for research.[3]
• Rapidly rising journal subscription prices have severely eroded the ability of libraries, universities, and scholars to purchase the publications necessary for research and education.[2]
• Removing access barriers to this literature will accelerate research, enrich education, share learning.[1]
• The role for copyright should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.[1]

1. BOAI Budapest Open Access Initiative
2. Framing the Issue: Open Access
3. Open-Access Publication of Medical and Scientific Research, A Public Library of Science Background Paper

1. Antelman , Kristin. Do Open-Access Articles Have a Greater Research Impact? College and Research Libraries, 65 (2004): 372-382
2. The Effect of Open Access and Downloads ('Hits') on Citation Impact: A Bibliography of Studies
3. The Impact of Open Access Journals, A Citation Study from Thomson ISI

• Publishers face backlash over rising subscription costs; high prices have led some US institutions to cancel subscriptions to , or even boycott, scientific journals. Lancet, vol. 363, iss. 9402 (31 December 2003) 44-45.
• The Costs and Benefits of Library Site Licenses to Academic Journals
  2004. PNAS. vol. 101 no. 3 January 20 897-902.
• Public Library of Science
• BioMed Central Open Access Now
• Scholarly Publishing News: Internet Publishing Attracting Academics
• Open Access is on the Way
• 19 July 2004 Open Access News,
  • In the US: The U.S. House Appropriations Committee has issued a report that urges the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to make research available free within six months of publication.
  • In the UK: The report from the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee inquiry into Scientific Publications has now been published and should be of interest. There are strong recommendations for Open Access and institutional repositories. A concise summary by Peter Suber
  • Full report: Science and Technology Committee Scientific Publications: Free for all?
• University of California's Digital Library director on journal publishing economics and models
• Science Commons -- a project of Creative Commons -- "The mission of Science Commons is to encourage scientific innovation by making it easier for scientists, universities, and industries to use literature, data, and other scientific intellectual property and to share their knowledge with others. Science Commons works within current copyright and patent law to promote legal and technical mechanisms that remove barriers to sharing."
• Science Commons Makes Sharing Easier

Posting Articles on Your Web Pages:
Elsevier has announced it will now support one model of "open access publishing". Scientists may now put a "text version" of their final, reviewed, corrected, and accepted manuscript onto their personal/institutional websites as well as deposit a copy in the MBLWHOI Library digital institutional archive.

NOTE--this is NOT a PDF of your journal article as it appears in Elsevier Journal Title XYZ--it is a PDF of your final "text document (ex Word)" as submitted to the journal for publication.

We suggest you include a link to the published paper as part of the citation. Please contact for assistance with links to URLs & DOIs.

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