Over the past decade, the cost of scientific and medical journals has risen dramatically. This increased financial burden on researchers and on university and hospital libraries has coincided with a period of budgetary restraint. As a result, many libraries subscribe to fewer journals than they did a decade ago, in spite of the proliferation of journals during this period. Advances in information technology have made interlibrary loans easier and have brought journal articles directly to the computers sitting on researchers' desks. However, concerns remain about the financial burden of keeping up to date with the latest research results.
The Public Library of Science (www.publiclibraryofscience.org) is a “non-profit organization of scientists committed to making the world's scientific and medical literature freely accessible to scientists and to the public around the world, for the benefit of scientific progress, education and the public good.” To date, more than 28 000 scientists from over 170 countries have signed the Public Library of Science open letter in support of its objectives. These include providing ”the full contents of the published record of research and scholarly discourse in medicine and the life sciences in a freely accessible, fully searchable, interlinked form.”
The Journal of Psychiatry & Neuroscience (JPN) and its publisher, the Canadian Medical Association (CMA), have taken the first and most important step toward these objectives by making the contents of the journal freely available on its Web site (www.cma.ca/jpn). Unfortunately, few other journals have taken this step. A reasonably up-to-date list of journals that are available free, either at the time of publication or with a delay, is available at the Free Medical Journals Web site (www.freemedicaljournals.com). A small number of high impact journals are available free at the time of publication (e.g., Journal of Clinical Investigation, Developmental Biology, BMJ, Neurobiology of Disease). However, the list includes few journals in psychiatry or neuroscience. Even most journals sponsored by societies (e.g., Journal of Neuroscience, Neuropsychopharmacology, Journal of Psychopharmacology, International Journal of Neuropsychopharmacology, European Psychopharmacology) are not available free of charge, possibly because they are published as commercial ventures. JPN has the advantage of being sponsored by the Canadian College of Neuropsychopharmacology and published by the CMA, a noncommercial organization.
The Public Library of Science suggests that those who support its objectives do their best to publish in journals that make their hard-earned results freely available. For researchers in psychiatry and neuroscience who wish to follow this suggestion but still want to publish in a journal with a high impact factor (i.e., > 2), JPN is one of the few options available.
Footnotes
Correspondence to: Dr. Simon N. Young, Department of Psychiatry, McGill University, 1033 Pine Ave. W, Montreal QC H3A 1A1; fax 514 398-4370; syoung@med.mcgill.ca