Highly Profitable Medical Journal Says Open Access Publishing Has Failed. Right. | Forbes

Surprise: the New England Journal of Medicine thinks open access is a bad idea. Open access is the model of scientific publishing in which all results are freely available for anyone, anywhere, to read.

This week NEJM published an editorial by one of their correspondents,  Charlotte Haug, that purports to present an objective look at open access publishing, and finds that the “experiment” has failed, and that free access to scientific publications hasn’t delivered on its promises.

What is NEJM worried about? Their expensive, exclusive model of publishing–where everyone has to pay high subscription fees, or else pay exhorbitant fees for each article they read–is threatened by scientists who want all science to be free. Pesky scientists!

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