Table 1 Comparisons between the publishing models

History of basic principles

First printing press made by Johannes Gutenberg in 1440. Many printing companies worldwide. Significant recent consolidation.

Internet first working in 1969. PDF files mimic printed page, and prevent alteration of content. BioMed Central publishes open access articles from 2000.

Copyright ownership

Publisher

Author

Payment for publishing articles

Usually none, but some journals have a "per page" charge

The institution, research funder, or author submitting the article

Payment for reading articles

The readers through payment or subscriptions

None

Submission

Usually internet

Internet

Publication

Usually paper and internet

Internet

Peer review

Yes

Yes

Time to publication after acceptance

Highly variable, from same day posting of manuscript, to many months later in print

Same day posting of manuscript with replacement by typeset final version some weeks later

Visibility

Variable, other than for the abstract, and depends on cost of access

High, with free full article access

Number of articles

Limited by issue/volume pages

Unlimited

Typical proponents

Publishers

Public and charitable funders: eg National Institutes of Health (USA), Wellcome Trust (UK), Medical Research Council (UK), Howard Hughes Medical Institute (USA)

Cost of use of colour

$500–1000 per printed page

None

Paper copy in hand

Yes

Only by printing the article

Embedding of cines

Not on paper

Yes, in the primary article

Citation index

Yes

Yes

Cited by PubMed and other scholarly search sites

Yes

Yes

Trend in citation index

Neutral

Increase through visibility

Long term archiving

Yes

Yes

Back archive

Yes

Yes