A proposal for evaluating and rewarding the impact of research articles.(Letters)

Dear Sir,

For the benefit of the scientific community, complete Open Access to all primary scientific articles is clearly the only way to go. But to ensure the quality of the papers published, it is hard to conceive that scientific publishing could be carried out except by paid professionals. The only viable solution is therefore for publishing charges to be levied on authors. This is in fact very much the route followed by the pioneering enterprise launched as BioMed Central. On the whole, however, authors have been reluctant to publish first-rate papers in such journals because of negative perceptions and upfront charges for publication.

I believe, …