Dana Ruth said: "I think there is a tendency to overly generalize the access problem which, in my mind, is primarily a problem with the biomedical literature. Lack of access, by members of the general public who need to go from PubMed to the full text, is obviously very frustrating. My sense, however,  is that few serious researchers or students are truly having a problem with access to the scientific literature. Granted there are problems for non-subscribers desirous of immediate ... seamless ... access.  But with options such as institutional document delivery, visiting or contacting a friend at a subscribing library, direct purchase of individual articles, author websites, institutional repositories, etc. ... I doubt that very many researchers are having a serious problem with access."  On the contrary, a very very large number of researchers around the world are having a serious problem with access. Perceptions depend on one's own circumstances. We are all conditioned by our own experience. Dana lives in California and works at Caltech. Affluent places. Most researchers in the world work in places where their libraries cannot afford even one tenth or one hundredth of Caltech library's collection of books, journals, reports, and paid online sources. For us the access problem is real and huge. [Even in the affluent West, librarians associations started advocating open access when they started feeling the pinch of steep rises in journal subscription costs.] That is why many of us advocate open access repositories. When arXiv was founded, physicists around the world (including those working at Caltech, Stanford, MIT, Harvard, Princeton, Oxford and Cambridge) benefited a great deal. That is why researchers in less-endowed institutions need open access to all research. And the preferred mode is OA repositories. Talking about OA journals, notice that many OA journals in the West (e.g. PLoS, BMC) charge a publication fee from the authors, but hardly any OA journal published from Brazil or India or any other developing country. Access and affordability are both important. One without the other is far less effective.  And when every researcher adopts open access self-archiving, then  everyone, everywhere, will have free online access to all journal articles and the issue of affordability (for subscribing to expensive journals) will diminish in importance. That is where institutional and funder OA mandates become important.  Arun Subbiah Arunachalam Distinguished Fellow Centre for Internet and Society Bangalore, India
