"Open
access truly expands shared knowledge across scientific fields - it is
the best path for accelerating multi-disciplinary breakthroughs in
research."
— Open Letter to the US Congress signed by 25 Nobel Prize winners (August 26, 2004)
OPEN ACCESS
Biomed Press endorses the definition of open access publication drafted by the
Bethesda Meeting on Open Access Publishing. However, Biomed Press has chosen to apply the less-restrictive
Creative Commons Attribution License
(CCAL) to all works we publish. Unlike the Bethesda Convention, the
CCAL allows commercial re-use of all Biomed Press journals' content.
Open access is a property of individual works, not necessarily journals or publishers.
Definition of Open Access Publication
An Open Access Publication[1] is one that meets the following two conditions:
- 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.
- 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).
Notes:
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.