Igem Paris Bettencourt team - Open Access and bioterrorism lyrics

Open Access means unrestricted online access to information and it is primarily intended for scholarly research. Authors can provide Open Access to their publications by self-archiving their journal articles in an open access repository, known as “green” open access, or by publishing in an open access journal, known as “golden” open access. The greatest advantange is that any research article published under Open Access is accessible to anyone that has internet. Lately a new trend has become pretty famous, called “Going Green”. It is an alternative Open Access model in which research funders require that peer-reviewed papers be made openly accessible in online repositories, without the author paying a fee. This usually happens some months after publication. The Open Access movement has uncovered serious social problems caused by restricting access to academic research as well as serious economic challenges for the future of academic publishing. Developing countries, where some universities find it difficult to pay subscriptions required to access the most recent journal articles, can now benefit from Open Access. The greatest aim of Open Access is to make information accessible to everyone. Nevertheless, what would happen if people willing to harm humankind get information of possible biological warfare agents under Open Access? Bioterrorism is the use of biological agents as biological weapons that can harm mankind. Biodefense involves medical measures to protect against biological agents. The Journal of Bioterrorism & Biodefense is an academic scientific journal and is one of the best Open Access journals of scholarly publishing. The journal follows an Editorial Tracking System for quality peer-review process, this means that every man*script submitted online follows a review and tracking process performed by the editorial board members in order to fully track who, where and when the information is downloaded. The information is accessible to everyone, but because of the potential application, the information is being monitored. The fact of having information in Open Access accessible to anyone has raised a strong discussion about the determination of dangerous data. We will give to you an example: 21st June 2012 The New York Times published an article describing a controversial situation caused by two papers published in prominent scientific journals that postulated the identification of five mutations on the bird flu virus that could lead to a high infectious and lethal virus stem. Should these results be released in an accesible form to everyone? Is it potentially dangerous data? Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases said “There is always a risk. But I believe the benefits are greater than the risks. Being in the free and open literature makes it easier to get a lot of the good guys involved than the risk of getting the rare bad guy involved.” In conclusion, the community of scientists think that any data should be accessible under Open Access. To keep information open is also a way to prevent bioterrorism. One of the principal goals of iGEM is to make information accesible to everyone. When iGEM originated the most important aim was to establish a fair and open network in which scientific and any other kind of information can be exchanged.