Nothing is said in this article about research published in book form; nor about whether BU's move will be mandatory or not. I wonder how those whose publications are more normally in book form - which by and large means non-scientific authors - will fare under the new arrangement. Will projects already under contract with publishers be exempt? If not, I can see no reason why the publishers should continue with the contract, since BU will be creating a "rival" publication against which they will not be able to afford to publish (and which will give them a get-out for axing the contract). Presumably works already published will not be included in the open access, or only by arrangement with the publishers, but it would be good to know. What selection process will there be to determine whether a book counts as research? For example, a synthesis of information on a subject, or a textbook. Or a biography? Turning to journal articles, is it expected that academic journals will continue to accept articles that are also posted free on the University website? Is there enough knowledge of how the journal publishing industry will be impacted by the open-access movement, I wonder? One can envisage well- established authors faring all right, since the journals may be desperate to hang onto their existence by still representing the "best" authors, but will this be true for lesser known authors? At some point it's to be assumed that academic journals will find they need a totally different model to sustain themselves (and many will presumably not survive). I also wonder what impact this open-access move will have on the tenure process, and on the prospects of young BU faculty getting positions elsewhere. If, instead of publishing in academic journals, their work appears on the BU site, validated simply by BU "journal-editors" (who, by the way, will need to be identified, and remunerated, by the University for the immense task of approving, editing, and fact-checking the material that comes to them, tasks currently accomplished by the academic journals), will they have as much credibility as if they had published "outside" their home university? At least until open access becomes established everywhere - and the article is perhaps right that it is unstoppable - they may be at a disadvantage. In the longer term, when/if the move to open access has become the norm everywhere, it's to be presumed that pay-to-view journals will cease business or be absorbed into universities that are willing to foot the cost of supporting them (on the analogy of the Harvard Human Rights Journal, for example). This will necessarily impact parts of the academic book-publishing world, even if most or all books are to be exempted from the open-access requirement. Academic presses that are currently able to support their book-publishing (where capital expenditure happens before revenue) with journal-publishing (where subscription revenue arrives before capital expenditure) will certainly find it harder to sustain themselves. The same will apply to those journals that are owned by learned societies. While it's probably true that, even taken together, university-press-published and privately-owned journals do not represent the majority of currently available journals, they none the less include many titles that are important in their fields, for example the Journal of Political Economy, the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, History Workshop Journal, the Journal of Biochemistry, etc. etc. Perhaps rich universities will acquire these and publish them free - and be willing to duplicate the postings of articles that are already available on the websites of the writers' universities. Free access is a wonderful thing, from which we all benefit, but it has a very considerable cost. I am sure that the above implications of the decision have been considered by those responsible for making it, but I hope that more information will be made available to us shortly. Frances Whistler Director of publications, Editorial Institute, BU