Securing affordable public access is the right thing to do in the long run for the benefit of science

Open Access publishing is particularly relevant in environmental health because the field directly relates to decisions in society, issues that often attract public attention. To make the best possible decisions as a society, documentation on environmental hazards should be shared with the public, policy makers, the private sector, and other interested parties. In other words, the results of such concerning science should be widely accessible to all, with no excessive fees to pay, particularly since science is often financed by public funds. My ambition was therefore to use the Open Access opportunity to help environmental health research become more readily available and thereby more useful.

Shortly after Dr. Ozonoff and I started our OA journal in 2002, a major journal in the field followed suit – published by the U.S. National Institutes of Health – and also became Open Access. We take some pride in paving the way for two journals in environmental health to go OA. As newcomers, we had to establish our journal as a solid and attractive resource, which took some time. At least two measures suggest that we have been successful. A traditional measure is the so-called Impact Factor, and this rating soon put us in the top quarter of indexed journals in the public health and epidemiology sectors.

A more appropriate measuring parameter, to my mind, is download statistics. We publish articles as soon as authors have approved the final formatting. Within weeks after release, most articles are being accessed from the journal website hundreds of times (articles can also be downloaded from other servers, so the numbers retrieved are not total accesses). Several articles that we have published have been downloaded more than 100,000 times. In my opinion, that is a stellar success. Can you imagine print journals being pulled out from library shelves and scrutinized in reading rooms or photocopied 100,000 times? Our OA journal has therefore helped our field make a true contribution to public health.

While we don’t know who our readers are, I have my doubts as to whether all downloads are due to the keen interest of our colleagues in the field of environmental health. The largest of our professional societies has no more than a few thousand members. So the numbers point to an interest beyond academic institutions, certainly including scientists in other scientific fields, but also the general public, governmental agencies, related industries, and others around the world. The fact that the articles that we publish are downloaded this often clearly documents that we’re doing the right thing.

Achievements are due to a team effort, involving highly-respected associate editors, an impressive editorial board, and countless reviewers. They all believe in the project, and they support OA, as we do, by working for free.

There is a cost, of course, and revenue is needed to pay for the server, the website, and staff. Our journal belongs to a commercial publisher, which has now been acquired by a large publishing group. The business model is to charge authors a processing fee, and we have seen it inching steadily upwards over the years. We have no say in these matters, but we worry when our colleagues complain that they have insufficient funds to pay the fee. All I can respond is that my colleagues and I work for free.