Release of Open Access (FREE TO READ) (November 21, 2006)

The American Physical Society (APS) is pleased to announce the release of FREE TO READ.

FREE TO READ allows individuals or institutions to pay a modest fee ($975/PR article and $1300/PRL) to provide access, through our sites, to the full text versions of selected articles published in APS journals at no cost to the reader and without a subscription. FREE TO READ is not limited to recent publications, and can be applied to any article or group of articles from APS's extensive archive which goes back to 1893. The payment form is available at http://forms.aps.org/author/Free2Read_2.pdf [1].

During the past few years the pricing of APS journals has been guided by the mission of APS to "advance and diffuse the knowledge of physics", and the desire to create an equitable sharing of the cost of publishing the physics literature between the larger research institutions and smaller schools. FREE TO READ serves both of these by, first, allowing anyone (individuals, institutions, funding agencies, etc.), through the payment of a one-time fee, to make articles widely available outside the usual subscription model, and, second, by applying any initial modest revenue towards keeping the physics literature accessible to smaller institutions. The additional revenue will allow us to control small institution subscription prices and to experiment with new models for payment by these entities.

To highlight this release, the APS has made a selection of articles available. These FREE TO READ articles include many which are of current or historic interest to the general public - papers on a winning strategy for online bidding (Yang and Kahng, Phys. Rev. E 73, 067101 (2006)) [2] and the dynamics of epidemics (Gross et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 96, 208701 (2006)) [3],which were highlighted in the New York Times earlier this year; and, in honor of Albert Einstein, all 38 articles in the 1949 special issue of Reviews of Modern Physics [4] commemorating his seventieth birthday, as well as the famous Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paper (Phys. Rev. 47, 777 (1935)) [5] challenging quantum mechanics and Niels Bohr's response (Phys. Rev. 48, 696 (1935)) [6].

We are also pleased to announce that the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) has shown its support of FREE TO READ by financing two recent publications, Benedetto et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 97, 034801 (2006) [7] and Giovannini, Phys. Rev. D 74, 063002 (2006) [8].

The APS is determined to extend every effort to make this model successful and sustainable. With the continued support of authors, funding agencies, and institutions like CERN, the APS believes FREE TO READ represents a path by which the journals could gradually transition to full Open Access.

For additional information, please go to the FREE TO READ FAQ at http://publish.aps.org/FREETOREAD_FAQ.html [9].