The Great Open-Access War of '07

It began with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute pressuring Elsevier to allow articles to be freely accessible within six months of publication, says Alex Palazzo on his blog. They compromised. HHMI would pay $1500 per article by an HHMI researcher and then it could go into PubMed Central after six months. Then, a Journal of Cell Biology editorial criticized HHMI for giving in to Elsevier. HHMI responded that it is trying to balance public access with scholarly freedom. The JCB editors currently have the last word, "Instead, the public access movement has suffered because HHMI gave in to the selfish desire of some of their investigators to continue publishing in Cell. This serves neither the public, nor science."