Open Access in Medical Publishing

In scientific publishing, open access (OA) means access that is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions to accessing literature and articles that have traditionally been published in scholarly journals. There are several variations in open access publishing: gold OA: a fully open access journals hosted by the publisher with no restrictions to online access; green OA: authors store their articles, which may have been published as non-open access in traditional journals, into repositories; hybrid open access journals: traditional journals providing a certain number of open access articles; delayed open access journals: open access articles provided after a period of embargo. The aim of this article is to give an overview of the main repositories in the field of biomedicine (PubMed Central, BioMed Central, PLoS) and to introduce open access journals.