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With considerable attention now being paid within scholarly communications to publication models that increase access to research, the launch of the open access journal Open Medicine demonstrates the contribution that open access, in all of its various economic models, can make to scholarly traditions of editorial independence, intellectual integrity, and academic freedom. This paper details the history of Open Medicine, which was born of an editorial-interference incident in the field of medical publishing, and offers a case study of the current political economy of academic publishing. This new journal demonstrates how open access, in combination with open source publishing and management software, enables new journals to more readily protect the academic freedom of researchers and scholars. As we argue, this method of publishing provides a venue for the emergence of new approaches, ideas, and independence from sources of competing interests in scholarly publishing.
Willinsky et al. (Mon,) studied this question.