I'm alive!

Sorry for not posting for so long... been very busy (doing minor corrections on my master's thesis... final deposit tomorrow! freedom!) AND been very sick at the same time... Fate has a twisted sense of humor it seems. Ok... being on the highway in the pouring rain for 2 hours probably didn't help :) So... here's today article for my (2) recurrent, non-comment posting readers :P Open access to scientific litterature is getting hot... very hot. Think open source science, free access to all. See BioMed Central for a good primer on this. Predictably, it's publishers vs pro-open access people (basically, everyone else... researchers, students, etc). The restricted access model is not only very costly, it's very frustrating. We have to pay BOTH for submitting papers and to have access to the journal. Many universities (like mine) can't pay for internet acces to all the journals, especially the most interesting (Nature, Cell) which are very costly, even for an institution subscription. So you have to order the articles which interest you, a process that can take from 1 to 2 weeks (and cost a pretty penny, too). It's just restricting science, slowing the process for... no good reason, except the bottom line of the publishers we don't even need. Sure, they provide the peer reviewing platform. And open access platform can do the same... I'd be more inclined to pay ONLY for submitting papers.

Anyway, I don't think they'll resist for long. The internet is too powerfull... and shouldn't be limited in any way.