arXiv is a repository of electronic preprints approved for posting after moderation, but not full peer review. It consists of scientific papers in the fields of mathematics, physics, astronomy, electrical engineering, computer science, quantitative biology, statistics, mathematical finance and economics, which can be accessed online. In many fields of mathematics and physics, almost all scientific papers are self-archived on the arXiv repository. Begun on August 14, 1991, arXiv.org passed the half-million-article milestone on October 3, 2008, and had hit a million by the end of 2014. By October 2016 the submission rate had grown to more than 10,000 per month.
Biophysics is an interdisciplinary science that applies approaches and methods traditionally used in physics to study biological phenomena. Biophysics covers all scales of biological organization, from molecular to organismic and populations. Biophysical research shares significant overlap with biochemistry, molecular biology, physical chemistry, physiology, nanotechnology, bioengineering, computational biology, biomechanics, developmental biology and systems biology.
The American Physical Society (APS) is the world's second largest organization of physicists. The Society publishes more than a dozen scientific journals, including the prestigious Physical Review and Physical Review Letters, and organizes more than twenty science meetings each year. APS is a member society of the American Institute of Physics.
Open access (OA) is a mechanism by which research outputs are distributed online, free of cost or other barriers, and, in its most precise meaning, with the addition of an open license applied to promote reuse.
Physical Review is an American peer-reviewed scientific journal established in 1893 by Edward Nichols. It publishes original research as well as scientific and literature reviews on all aspects of physics. It is published by the American Physical Society (APS). The journal is in its third series, and is split in several sub-journals each covering a particular field of physics. It has a sister journal, Physical Review Letters, which publishes shorter articles of broader interest.
PubMed is a free search engine accessing primarily the MEDLINE database of references and abstracts on life sciences and biomedical topics. The United States National Library of Medicine (NLM) at the National Institutes of Health maintains the database as part of the Entrez system of information retrieval.
Springer Science+Business Media or Springer, part of Springer Nature since 2015, is a global publishing company that publishes books, e-books and peer-reviewed journals in science, humanities, technical and medical (STM) publishing. Springer also hosts a number of scientific databases, including SpringerLink, and SpringerImages. Book publications include major reference works, textbooks, monographs and book series; more than 168,000 titles are available as e-books in 24 subject collections. Springer has major offices in Berlin, Heidelberg, Dordrecht, and New York City.
PubMed Central (PMC) is a free digital repository that archives publicly accessible full-text scholarly articles that have been published within the biomedical and life sciences journal literature. As one of the major research databases within the suite of resources that have been developed by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), PubMed Central is much more than just a document repository. Submissions into PMC undergo an indexing and formatting procedure which results in enhanced metadata, medical ontology, and unique identifiers which all enrich the XML structured data for each article on deposit. Content within PMC can easily be interlinked to many other NCBI databases and accessed via Entrez search and retrieval systems, further enhancing the public's ability to freely discover, read and build upon this portfolio of biomedical knowledge.
New Journal of Physics is an online-only, open-access, peer-reviewed scientific journal covering research in all aspects of physics, as well as interdisciplinary topics where physics forms the central theme. The journal was established in 1998 and is a joint publication of the Institute of Physics and the Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft. It is published by IOP Publishing. The editor-in-chief is Barry C. Sanders (University of Calgary and University of Science and Technology of China). New Journal of Physics is part of the SCOAP3 initiative.
John Wilbanks is the chief commons officer at Sage Bionetworks and a senior fellow at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation and at FasterCures. He runs the Consent to Research Project.
Chemistry Central was a scientific publisher specializing in open access publications in chemistry. It was established on August 22, 2006 and was operated by BioMed Central. Along with BioMed Central and the now-defunct PhysMath Central, Chemistry Central was part of "Open Access Central", representing open access publishing in life science and medicine, physics and maths, and chemistry, respectively. When Springer acquired the BioMed Central Group in 2008, Chemistry Central was transferred with it.
Respiratory Research is an open access peer-reviewed medical journal published by BioMed Central. It covers all aspects of respiratory disease, including clinical and basic research. The journal publishes research articles, commentaries, letters to the editor, and reviews.
Human Resources for Health is a peer-reviewed open-access public health journal publishing original research and case studies on issues of information, planning, production, management, and governance of the health workforce, and their links with health care delivery and health outcomes, particularly as related to global health. It was established in 1997 as the Human Resources Development Journal published by the Health Manpower Development Institute of the Ministry of Public Health of Thailand. Since 2003, it is published by BioMed Central in collaboration with the World Health Organization (WHO).
Chinese Physics Letters is a peer reviewed scientific journal in the fields of chemistry and physics and related interdisciplinary fields. The journal was established in 1984, and is published by the Chinese Physical Society. It is published in English and is an open access journal.
The NIH Public Access Policy is an open access mandate, drafted in 2004 and mandated in 2008, requiring that research papers describing research funded by the National Institutes of Health must be available to the public free through PubMed Central within 12 months of publication. PubMed Central is the self-archiving repository in which authors or their publishers deposit their publications. Copyright is retained by the usual holders, but authors may submit papers with one of the Creative Commons licenses.
Raymond Ethan Goldstein FRS FInstP is Schlumberger Professor of Complex Physical Systems in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics (DAMTP) at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge.
The idea and practise of providing free online access to journal articles began at least a decade before the term "open access" was formally coined. Computer scientists had been self-archiving in anonymous ftp archives since the 1970s and physicists had been self-archiving in arxiv since the 1990s. The Subversive Proposal to generalize the practice was posted in 1994.
