Open Access Neurophysiology Articles

Open access to the scientific literature means removing obstacles to accessing academic research (including price obstacles). There are two parallel open access paths to neurophysiology: Open Access articles and self-archiving neurophysiology. Articles on Open Access Neurophysiology are instantly, freely accessible on their website, a model financed mainly by fees charged by the author (usually via a research grant). The alternative for a researcher is a self-archiving neurophysiology (i.e. publishing in a traditional journal, where only subscribers have immediate access but the article is made available on their personal and/or institutional websites (including so-called repositories or archives)), a practice that many scholarly journals permit. Open Access neurophysiology poses practical and policy issues for researchers, authors, funders and policy makers alike, like what the return on investment is when charging an article processing fee to be published in open access journals, or if investments should be made in institutional libraries and whether self-archiving should be made compulsory, as envisaged by some funders in neurophysiology.