I'm pleased to see that the new journal, Neuroethics, will provide free full-text access to its articles in 2008 and 2009. It's hard to imagine a better way for a new journal to develop a wide following.
Legal academia has been transformed to some extent by a kind of de facto open access provided by SSRN and BePress. Law bloggers frequently cite to draft and sometimes final articles that appear on those sites. Law review articles can now be read not just by lawyers or law professors with access to Westlaw or Lexis but also by those who do interdisciplinary work who wouldn't ordinarily use law-related databases.
I understand that paper-and-ink publishers need to make some revenue to survive. But information "wants to be free" as they say. It's nice to learn that publishers can accommodate open access, even if it's only for a limited, though substantial, period of time.
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