Making research findings freely available is an essential aid to medical progress | Science Codex

"In a PLOS Medicine guest editorial, Paul Glasziou, Professor of Evidence-Based Medicine at Bond University in Australia, explores how open access publications could help moderate and reduce the vast waste of global medical research. Continuing on from his previous work, which highlighted how most of the world's expenditure on medical research was thrown away, Glasziou outlines how bad the situation is and suggests how it might be improved. Subscription-based academic journals make money by through copyrights assigned by authors to publishers who lock the articles behind paywalls. Open access models, in which journals charge a publication fee and then make research and related content fully and immediately available to all, stand to aid the dissemination of knowledge and to improve its quality ..."