Top medical and scientific societies commit to providing free access to research

The Washington DC Principles for Free Access to Science increases access to new research findings, while maintaining high standards for responsible scientific publishing

• A commitment to maintaining and enhancing the independence, rigor, trust and visibility that have helped to establish scholarly journals as reliable filters of information that is generated by clinical and laboratory research and provide a filter for dissemination of health care policy.
  
  
• Support of several forms of free access, including the availability of:
  
  
  1. important articles from scientific or medical journals,
  2. journal content for scientists working in many low-income nations,
  3. the full text of journals worldwide immediately or within months of publication,
  4. content for indexing by major search engines so readers worldwide can locate information.
  
  
  
• Continued development of long-term preservation solutions for online journals to ensure the ongoing availability of the scientific literature.
  
  
• Dedication to work with authors, peer-reviewers, and editors for the development of robust online and electronic tools to improve efficiency of their important intellectual endeavors.
  
  
• The reinvestment of revenue from journals in direct support of science worldwide, including scholarships, scientific meetings, grants, educational outreach, advocacy for research funding, the free dissemination of information to the public and improvements in scientific publishing.

• Robert D. Wells, Ph.D., President of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB). Dr. Wells is also the former associate editor of the Journal of Biological Chemistry and currently the Director of the Center for Genome Research at the Institute of Biosciences and Technology, Texas A&M University, Houston, TX.
  
  
• John Iglehart, Founding Editor, Health Affairs, Project HOPE. Health Affairs is a peer-reviewed, multidisciplinary journal and the largest circulation health policy periodical published in the United States.
  
  
• Alice Avila-Villalobos, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Environmental Medicine, University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry, Rochester, NY. Dr. Avila-Villalobos is a junior scientist who has been mentored by outreach and education programs underwritten by scholarly societies.
  
  
• Karin Wittenborg, MLS, is the University Librarian at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA. She currently serves on the Advisory Council for Stanford's Academic Computing and Libraries, Brown University's Committee on Information Resources, and on the Executive Committee of the Digital Library Federation.
  
  
• William Rosner, MD, is Professor of Medicine and Associate Dean, College of Physician and Surgeons, Columbia University, and Director, Institute of Health Sciences, St. Luke's-Roosevelt University, Hospital Center, New York, New York. Dr. Rosner is also Chair of the Publications Committee for the Endocrine Society and a scientific/physician user of the literature. His major area of clinical interest is androgenic disorders in women.
  
  
• Martin Frank, Ph.D., spokesperson for the DC Principles and Executive Director of the American Physiological Society (APS). APS is one of the oldest biomedical sciences research societies in America. The not-for-profit association has published the American Journal of Physiology since 1898 and presently publishes 13 other journals.