Having worked in the biotechnology industry I know the costs and frustration associated with gaining access to peer-reviewed journals. I worked for a small (less than 10 employees) bioproducts company and was doing ground-breaking research and gene cloning but was unable to lay hands on many of the journal articles I wanted to read, because the company didn’t subscribe to the right publishing groups. Furthermore, getting to a library that held those collections was an hour’s drive away and online access wasn’t allowed because I wasn’t faculty or a student.

That’s why the movement towards free online access is so extremely important to small companies such as mine and it’s encouraging to see the NIH join the ranks of institutions that require public access to scientific literature resulting from work they have funded. For more on open-access publishing, and who's jumping onboard, read the article by H. Varmus, in PLoS Biology.

_Source:

Varmus, H. 2008. Progress toward public access to science. PLoS Biol 6(4):e101. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0060101.