Current mood:	pensive
Current music:	Stranglers - Something Better Change

Information just wants to be free
As I mentioned earlier I switched companies last year. I enjoy keeping in touch with many of my friends at the previous place and one good reason is that an ex-colleagues and I are involved in writing a fairly extensive review. I noticed, while trawling through the recent literature, that there appears to be an increased tendency for articles to cite other articles where the text is available freely (e.g. jounals like the excellent Drug Metabolism and Disposition) and is a simple click away when you find it through PubMed. Naturally if there is a key reference and it occurs in an obscure and/or closed-text publication it will be cited as a matter of course but, if there's a choice between the two, the free option appears to win more often. Those personal libraries of free PDF or HTML files make searching and citing very easy, while for the special requests most electronic retrieval facilities only supply inconvenient TIFFs of scanned documents instead. I'm glad that a journal's impact factor does not depend on it being pay-only and less accessible. In fact some of the free journals have very high impact factors. I know that money has to be made at some point but I really appreciate the open access journals and thank their publishers for making them available. It really helps to get the job done.