Open access, open data and drug bulletins

Use the link to access pay-per-view options for the full text article published in Drug and Therapeutics Bulletin from BMJ. The abstract reads as follows: “Time may show that 2012 was the year when open-access publishing – long supported, but not enforced, by research funders and institutions – reached its tipping point. In June a working group for the UK government recommended a ‘clear policy direction to support publication in open access or hybrid journals, funded by article processing charges, as the main vehicle for the publication of research, especially when it is publicly funded’. The group's chair, Dame Janet Finch, asserted that ‘the long term future lies with open access. . .we need to embrace this change and do so in a measured way’. Supporting the gradual transition from subscription-based publishing could increase the cost to higher education in the UK by £56–58 million a year, but this is a small fraction of the £5.5 billion currently spent by research councils and funders and will, said the group, deliver huge benefits to the economy. However, the potential impact of open-access publishing on secondary publications, such as drug bulletins, deserves consideration. Research Councils UK define open access as ‘unrestricted, online access to peer reviewed and published scholarly research papers’ that enables free reading of, searching for, and reuse of published papers (including text and data mining), all with proper attribution. The two main models are ‘gold’, where publishers provide open access, and ‘green’, where authors place their manuscripts, preprints or published articles in open access repositories. Many biomedical journals take a middle way, facilitating deposition of published articles in the US National Library of Medicine's open archive PubMed Central after an initial period behind a pay wall. Others are hybrid journals where research is openly accessible or where just some research is ‘unlocked’...”