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Open access: does it address our problems?

Chemistry publishing suffers from multiple problems: journals that are very expensive, an explosion in the number of publications (both in terms of actual papers and the number of journals), library budget increases that fail to meet inflation rates. The net result is that chemists face an increasing inability to access the complete literature. Proponents of Open Access (OA) hope to address this problem by removing the costs of access to the literature. In my talk, I address how OA may not prove suitable to address the cost issues. Furthermore, I argue that OA does not address the more critical issues of information overload and lack of progress in the technology of chemical publishing. Chemists need to focus on what should and should not be published and the technologies to do so in an enhanced manner.

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Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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Bachrach, S. Open access: does it address our problems?. Chemistry Central Journal 3 (Suppl 1), O15 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1186/1752-153X-3-S1-O15

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/1752-153X-3-S1-O15

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