PNAS - Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

May 24, 2004
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
MEDIA CONTACT:
Bridget Coughlin, Managing Editor
202-334-1370, e-mail
PNAS Introduces Open Access Publishing Option
http://www.pnas.org
The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) now offers an open access
publishing option. PNAS authors may opt to pay a $1000 surcharge to make their articles available
for free via PNAS Online (www.pnas.org) and PubMed Central (www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov)
immediately upon publication. PNAS will offer this open access option as an experiment until
December 31, 2005. PNAS will then continue to move toward an author-pays open access model,
maintain the option in the same or modified form, or discontinue it. By introducing this option,
PNAS strengthens its commitment to making the scientific literature more freely available than
ever before, and hopes that its support of open access will encourage other scientific publishers to
follow suit. PNAS will evaluate author participation and the financial impact of the open access
option on PNAS revenue.
“The benefits to science of unfettered access to the literature are obvious,” says Nicholas R.
Cozzarelli, PNAS Editor-in-Chief. “Open access publishing offers the immediate release of scientific
results to everyone without the delay and cost of obtaining research articles through journal
subscriptions. The challenge of open access is how to pay for it. This is particularly important for
PNAS, which operates as a nonprofit, break-even operation and does not maintain contingency
funds or capital reserves. PNAS is starting by experimenting with an open access option for
authors. It is a compromise between open access for all articles and doing business as usual.” The
first open access article is by Yang and Purves (1), published online in PNAS Early Edition on May
19, 2004.
The open access option was approved overwhelmingly by the PNAS Editorial Board and
unanimously approved by the Publications Committee of the National Academy of Sciences, which
has oversight over PNAS. The decision was informed by a survey of 610 corresponding authors of
accepted papers conducted from August 22 to October 30, 2003. Of the 210 responses received,
almost one-half (49.5%) of the respondents were in favor of an open access option.
The open access experiment is PNAS's latest initiative to promote the broad dissemination of
science. Since January 2000, PNAS has provided free access to back issues online, and makes
PNAS content free at both the PNAS Online and PubMed Central web sites 6 months after
publication. Special features and papers from the National Academy of Sciences colloquia, as well
as multimedia online supporting information, are available for free immediately upon publication.
In addition, PNAS offers 145 developing countries free and immediate access to all journal
content.
Established in 1914 as the flagship journal of the National Academy of Sciences, PNAS publishes
high-impact research reports, commentaries, reviews, special features, colloquium papers, and
actions of the Academy. PNAS is a peer-reviewed multidisciplinary journal that spans the
biological, physical, and social sciences. The journal is printed weekly (52 issues per year) and
publishes new content online each business day. Ranked by the Institute for Scientific Information
as one of the world's most-cited scientific serials, PNAS Online receives more than 1.5 million hits
per week. The journal is a self-sustaining operation that is not funded by the National Academy of
Sciences or the government. For more information, please visit http://www.pnas.org.