Editorial Open access, predatory publishing and peer-review

* In recent years, scholarly publishing faced a new paradigm regarding the accessibility: the open access movement. “If an article is "Open Access" it means that it can be freely accessed by anyone in the world using an internet connection”. 1 The Budapest Open Access Initiative states: “By "open access" to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself”. 2 Some researchers may have never been concerned about this topic. It obviously means that they are affiliated with a rich institution from a rich country. There are few things more discouraging for a researcher than performing a literature search, retrieving a list of potentially interesting articles, and not being able to access many of them because one’s library does not subscribe those journals. And this lack of access will increase, even in major Universities from rich countries 3 , where the average cost of subscription reached 12,000 USD per faculty member more than 10 years ago. 4 Administrations are regulating the access to the results of publicly funded researches by using these open access systems: initially, through a voluntary Public Access Policy and then making it mandatory. 5 The European Union slowly followed a similar policy, initiated at the Seventh Framework Programme. 6 Many other institutions and countries are following this movement. 7 PubMed Central is a free archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature at the U.S. National Institutes of Health's National Library of Medicine (NIH/NLM), and it has the legislative mandate to collect and preserve the biomedical literature. 8