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: [email protected] --------------------- 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-payers¹ 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
