“Author pays” may be the new science publishing model

A consensus is emerging on how the internet will change the economics of scientific publishing.

In future, authors are likely to be asked to pay journals the costs of publishing their original research articles online, and journals will make these articles freely available to all from the moment of publication. The need to take out subscriptions to access electronic versions of original research will disappear.

This was the message at last week's advisory committee meeting of PubMed Central, the National Institutes of Health's initiative to free up access to reports of original research in the life sciences.

Electronic journals such as the …