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15 July 2003
Dave Ozonoff

Funding bodies should make Open Access a condition of awarding grants

Dear Sir,

As a researcher who has been funded for many years by public sources (primarily from CDC and NIH), it is my belief that the benefits of publicly funded research should be available to the public. They should not have to pay for it twice.

Public health research is not a private enterprise, but a public one by its very nature. Moreover public health is a global enterprise and must be freely available to everyone, including the developing world. None of us is safe until we are all safe. Freedom from requiring permission to read, copy and use research literature is also freedom of access.

Scientific information, at least in public health, is not private property, but most especially when it is financed with public funds. Government publications (such as Environmental Health Perspectives, one of the leading journals in my field) are already copyright-free, because they are government documents. That has not stopped any of us from trying to publish there.

I am co-Editor-in-Chief of an open access journal (Environmental Health, a BioMed Central specialty journal available at http://www.ehjournal.net). I started the journal with one of my colleagues because I believe in open access and was appalled at the behavior of some of the commercial publishers who were slowly monopolizing the market, a trend that in itself I saw as a danger.

Dave Ozonoff
Boston University School of Public Health,
Boston, MA, USA