Where Does the Free Online Scholarship Movement Stand Today?
Peter Suber, Philosophy Department, Earlham College There’s a lot happening these days to create free online access to peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly journal articles. Here are some of the more significant trends: • More disciplines are setting up preprint archives. • More open-access peer-reviewed journals are popping up in every field. Most of these are online-only. But journals like BMJ [British Medical Journal] and Cortex show that even the costs of a print edition do not foreclose the possibility of free online access to full text. • More universities are supporting institutional self-archiving for their research faculty. • More priced journals are experimenting with ways to offer some online content free of charge, and experimenting with ways to cover the costs of providing this kind of free access. • Editorial “declarations of independence” against publishers who limit access by charging exorbitant subscription prices are becoming more common. See my list at
