Gaceta Sanitaria

"The open access , meaning the free and open access to published research content, at first glance seems irrefutable. More still in fields such as public health, which, in most cases, researchers and research are organized and financed with public funds. In fact, own administrations and governments and directly enhance the open access publication of research financed by public funds; for example, the Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology 1 , and with a much stronger character the National Institutes of Health of the United States 2 , the European Union in March and the very British government following the instructions known as Finch Report 4 ( yes, charged with the explicit instruction that their findings should not harm the strong local publishing industry 5 ). All these initiatives are choosing officers called gold road , referred to the publication in open access journals in which authors pay the costs. But this model is not unique. Some scientific disciplines (mathematics, astronomy and physics) are using formulas published in open access without additional costs 6 (to include the proposed arXiv.org 7 ), not only to share data with colleagues and research, but Also as an alternative to some clearly be improved processes in traditional scientific journals, such as peer-review as it functions and 'malfunctions' in the media in August . It seems that even BioMed Central PubMedCentral initially tried to emulate this formula, but they stayed well away from the original nine . Still, in that Finch Report 4 mentions (p. 86) concerns publishing companies about the impact of repositories such as arXiv.org or PubMedCentral in reducing discharges from their own platforms, which puts 'nerve' these companies by 'the loss of subscriptions' (mainly from universities and public institutions, as the number of downloads is a criterion to renew or not these subscriptions with publishers) ..."