This claim should perhaps win a prize for audacity. To be clear: it is not just slightly wrong; it is preposterously wrong. Firstly, sending out printed copies of journals to subscribers who pay for them is in no way in conflict with the goals of Open Access. Many Open Access journals (such as PLoS Biology, Journal of Biology and Genome Biology) have print editions. Wherever there is a demand for print (from libraries or from individuals) then print editions are available to those who wish to pay to receive them, just as with a traditional journal. But, far more importantly, by Elsevier's own estimate some 30 million people in the UK (and more than half a billion people worldwide) use the Internet. The wonderful thing about Open Access is that any one of those hundreds of millions of people can print out copies of any Open Access article, and distribute them to whomever they want. If you want to get hold of an Open Access article, there are literally hundreds of millions potential sources. We already see the power of this mechanism in action. In the poorest countries in Africa, those scientists who are lucky enough to have access to the Internet are downloading Open Access articles from BioMed Central's journals (e.g. Malaria Journal), printing them out in large numbers, and distributing them to their colleagues in areas the Internet does not yet reach. They confirm to us that this makes the research vastly more accessible than research published in traditional print-only journals. In contrast, many traditional journals are received in print by only a few hundred libraries worldwide. Not only that, the libraries that hold these print copies are bound by strict rules governing what is and is not permissible in terms of copying and redistribution. To argue that these few hundred printed copies provide greater access to research than making articles openly accessible online is, frankly, ludicrous.