Open access is an area of great debate among publishers and readers of scientific journals. Acta Dermato-Venereologica is greatly in favour of progress towards more open access to published material, as this would be in the interest of authors, readers and the whole scientific community. As stated on our homepage, open access is in line with the worldwide trend of attempting to provide greater access to the results of scientific research, as shown by the Berlin Declaration in 2003, and perhaps best expressed in the new rules for National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Wellcome Trust grant holders. For instance, the Wellcome Trust, the world’s largest research charity, now demands that the final manuscripts of all authors’ research papers are deposited in PubMed Central, the free-to-access life sciences repository developed by the National Library of Medicine. Papers deposited in this repository must be made freely accessible no later than 6 months after publication. Furthermore, many universities have proposed that recipients of their research grants should place a copy of the published journal articles in an e-print repository on university or subject-based websites. This is in line with the intentions of Acta Dermato-Venereologica and, in this way, the research papers will be exposed to greater potential audiences; anyone with internet access will be able to read them without restriction. By adhering to these regulations, we believe that we will also further increase the impact of the research published in our journal.
There are successive steps to be taken. Acta Dermato-Venereologica owned and published by a non-profit organization, the Society for Publication of Acta Dermato-Venereologica, and is presently dependent on subscription fees, as no commercial interests are involved and no major contribution is received from any other organization.
Our present policy to enable as open access as possible is:
We also encourage authors to retain copyright of their work and instead sign a contract for license to publish with the journal.
Acta Dermato-Venereologica is a member of an international network on open access. Current debate on open access is followed carefully and in time we aim to move further towards this goal. We think that this will be an important step in distributing scientific information, not only to professionals but also to other members in the societies as to the general public.