Dear Stevan,
I took over the editorship of Cortex from De Renzi a few months ago.
Among the changes that I am implementing, after some struggles with the
publisher: Cortex will now be accessible free for everybody with no
delay on the net (
http://www.cortex-online.org).
I am writing for two reasons:
First is there any way a journal like Cortex could support the
Self-Archiving Initiative?
Second, given your efforts and zeal in promoting free access to
scientific reports, I wonder if you could find the time to write an
editorial (labelled Viewpoint) for Cortex readers summarising your own
views on the public library of science, and possibly setting them in
context presenting the opposite arguments (as mainitained by "Science"
for instance) and other initiatives such as SPARC.
I am attaching for your perusal our own short editorial introducing the
initiative.
Regards.
Sergio Della Sala, MD, MSc, PhD, FBPsS, FRSA
Professor of Neuropsychology
Honorary Consultant in Neurology
University of Aberdeen, UK
Facsimile: 01224 273426
E-mail: sergio_at_abdn.ac.uk
---------------------
EDITORIAL
CORTEX ON LINE
As announced in our first editorial (issue 1, 2001), Cortex is now ³on-line² thanks to the
work of Peter McGeorge, University of Aberdeen, and of people at Masson, Milan. Our
address is:
http://www.cortex-online.org. We invite you to frequently visit the Cortex
web site and to make it a favorite bookmark of yours.
The web site will enable you to download all articles appearing in Cortex free of charge.
We have decided to make this option available to all visitors to the web site subscribers
and non-subscribers alike. We believe that this will allow the manuscripts appearing in
Cortex to have a much wider dissemination than in the past. In addition, this will allow
clinical researchers working in countries that have difficulty accessing the journal due to
problems with their postal system or because of the cost of the journal to have the
opportunity to join the Cortex global community.
Ideally the output of scientific research, especially if funded by tax-payersı money,
should not be treated as private property. We support the establishment of open archives
of scientific literature with unrestricted access and intend to make a small contribution to
this endeavor with the creation of a fully searchable, interlinked web site.
However, Cortex is published by Masson Italia, a company that must make a profit to
survive. As from 2002, we are increasing the number of pages per year from 750 to 1000
(5 issues) and we are decreasing the cost of the individual subscription to 110 Euros per
year, which makes a print subscription to Cortex a good investment. If, however,
subscriptions fall because of our open-access web page policy, there is no doubt that we
will have to modify the policy. In that case, we might be able to allow subscribers
"instant" access to papers for downloading, but the rest of the
scientific community might have to wait some period of time before we
allow them to download papers free of charge.
For further discussion on the issue of free access to science see:
http://www.biomedcentral.com
http://www.publiclibraryofscience.org
http://www.openarchives.org
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm
http://www.arl.org/sparc
We wish to thank the members of the reconstituted editorial board for all their help this
past year and encourage our readership to make suggestions to us so that Cortex remains
a journal you have to read.
Jordan Grafman and Sergio Della Sala
Received on Sun Dec 16 2001 - 19:35:32 GMT