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IF YOU would like to read the latest research from my lab, be my guest. Our report on a protein from a mouse version of the winter vomiting virus has just been published in the journal PLoS One and is available online for free to anyone (vol 7, p e38723).

Contrast that with my first paper, published in 1990, which you could only have read if you had access to a university library with an expensive subscription to the journal Biochemistry.

Back in 1990 before the world wide web that was how scientific publishing was done. Today it is being transformed by open access publishers like the Public Library of Science. Rather than being funded by journal subscriptions, these publishers charge authors or their institutions the cost of publication and make their papers available for free online.

Many scientists are passionate supporters of open access and want to see the old model swept away. They have launched a protest movement dubbed the Academic Spring and organised a high-profile boycott of journals published by Elsevier. And the tide appears to be turning in their favour. This week the Finch Report, commissioned by the UK government, recommended that research papers especially those funded by the taxpayer should be made freely available to anyone who wants to read them.

Advocates of open access claim it has major advantages over the subscription model that has been around since academic journals were invented in the 17th century. They argue that science operates more effectively when findings can be accessed freely and immediately by scientists around the world. Better yet, it allows new results to be data-mined using powerful web-crawling technology that might spot connections between data insights that no individual would be likely to make.

But if open access is so clearly superior, why has it not swept all before it? The model has been around for a decade but about nine-tenths of the approximately 2 million research papers that appear every year are still published behind a paywall.

Part of the reason is scientists' reluctance to abandon traditional journals and the established ranking among them. Not all journals are equal they are graded by impact factor, which reflects the average number of times that the papers they publish are cited by others. Nature's impact factor is 36, one of the highest going, whereas Biochemistry's is around 3.2. Biochemistry is well regarded many journals have lower factors but a paper in Nature is still a much greater prize.

Unfortunately, it is prized for the wrong reasons. Impact factors apply to journals as a whole, not individual papers or their authors.

Despite this, scientists are still judged on publications in high-impact journals; funding and promotion often depend on it. Consequently few are willing to risk bucking the trend. This has allowed several publishers to resist calls to abandon the subscription model.

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Set science free from publishers' paywalls