Open access journals and forensic publishing.

Open access (OA) publishing makes articles available over the Internet at no charge. The OA movement had its official start in 2002 with the establishment of the Budapest Open Access Initiative. The goal of the OA movement is to remove access barriers, accelerate research, and thereby achieve its broader mission of promoting global welfare. The OA movement has made swift progress over the past decade, but has introduced a disruptive change into the scientific community. The early stages of OA publishing have raised strong apprehensions, such as reliability concerns and the emergence of so-called predatory journals. The OA initiative is both inspiring and unsettling. For the discipline of forensic psychiatry, research findings must be reliable enough to be proffered as testimony in court. The methods used by OA publishing make the resolution of the reliability problem somewhat unclear. Nevertheless, given the momentum of OA publishing, a substantial change in traditional publishing appears inevitable. The discipline of forensic psychiatry must keep abreast of this change and find innovative methods of preserving the integrity of the forensic science database.