Open access to all: publishers quake in boots

OK, that’s probably not strictly true, but economists from Toulouse University and the Free University of Brussels for the European Commission have issued a report stating that scientific research funded by the European taxpayer should be freely available to everyone over the internet — which the Guardian deems “a blow to the lucrative scientific publishing operations of media groups such as Reed Elsevier and Germany’s Springer.”

Why the worry? Because if research is freely available, why should people pay hefty subscriptions to the big companies for journals and the articles they contain? It also opens the door for more open-access research like what BioMedCentral has going already, publishing 110 open access journals in the fields of biology and medicine.

Its publisher, Matthew Cockerill, said of the EC report: “It confirms what BioMed Central has been saying for some time – that scientists and funders are getting a poor deal from the traditional publishing system, which delivers limited access at high cost.”

Meanwhile, Reed, which is one of the biggest players in scientific publishing, continued its takeover spree in healthcare information by acquiring an online drugs database operated by Gold Standard, an acquisition rumored to be between $40m-$60m.

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