Open access policy

摘要

We welcome The Lancet's stance on open access (April 6, p 1166).1 We note that you wish to review how you can make all publicly funded research as accessible and usable as possible. However, we also note that even with the announced changes, The Lancet will still have less free access than other key general medical journals. For example, there is free access to all research articles in The journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) after 6 months from 1998, in the New England journal of Medicine after 6 months from 1990, and in The British Medical journal immediately from 1840 onwards.The Lancet's plans would only apply to work funded by particular funders, and there is no mention of plans to improve access to already published studies. Currently institutional and personal subscriptions to The Lancet only provide access to issues from 1998 onwards. In our academic institution, the quote from Elsevier for our library to purchase access to pre-1998 issues is a large 5-figure sum equivalent to about 9% of our total serials budget, and several times what we paid for back issues of JAMA. How can The Lancet justify this huge cost? Many of the articles published before 1998 were also publicly funded.