Please comment, but with civility

Retrovirology is an Open Access journal. Every Retrovirology article is immediately available upon publication for all to read online, fee-free, in full text [1,2]. An Open Access journal is different from a subscription journal because the latter requires readers to pay a fee in order to access the full text content. On April 7th, 2008, the United States National Institutes of Health (NIH) nudged journal publishing a step closer towards universal Open Access. Beginning on that day, NIH stipulated that all manuscripts accepted for publication from NIH funded research must be deposited in full text into PubMed Central (PMC), an NIH online digital repository. Such articles in PMC will become freely accessible for all to read without charge no later than 12 months after publication.The NIH move is timely, and it parallels a growing trend that "fee-free" online access has become the public's choice for securing knowledge. For example, the Wall Street Journal reported on April 18, 2008, that print/subscription revenue at a major American newspaper, the New York Times (NYT), declined by 12.5% in March 2008 compared to March 2007. Interestingly, in the same report, fee-free access to the NYT's online news site was shown to have increased steadily and robustly.Retrovirology's 5-year experience echoes the above findings. It is not unusual that a published Retrovirology article is accessed one thousand or more times within the first week of its online appearance. In fact, during 2007, the two most highly accessed Retrovirology papers were each read more than 5,000 times [3]; [4]. Although we do not have firm data, elsewhere it has been shown that Open Access articles are more widely read and more highly cited than their non-Open Access counterparts [5].Open Access publishing appears to clearly benefit authors. Interestingly, the current technology of online publishing holds similar promise for interactive and nearly instantaneous participation from readers. Unlike printed jou