Open-Access Journals: The Future of Scientific Publishing?

The open-access publishing initiative started in the 1990s with the introduction of the World Wide Web that made the Internet available around the globe. The open-access publishing concept entails that scientific content is provided online to readers, free of charge. The “Public Library of Science” (PloS) was one of the first nonprofit open-access platforms launched with tremendous success in the early twenty-first century. Open-access publishing provides several unprecedented advantages compared to standard print journals. This includes the timely, unrestricted, free access to scientific knowledge by any reader with access to the Internet, by eliminating financial barriers related to expensive journal subscriptions and by reducing the usual time delay of several months (or years) from the time a scientific discovery is made until the information is available to the end user.