[Medical journals and open access]

The open access (OA) or the idea of a free access to scholarly literature published in electronic form has been already well established in the field of medicine. Medline has already been free for a decade, PubMed Central has been growing steadily. The global crisis of the scientific publishing, becoming increasingly dominated by multinational companies and constant increase of journal prices have moved to action not only individuals and institutions but governments and research charities too. The aim of this article is to give an overview of the main open access initiatives and resources in biomedicine (PubMed, PubMed Central, BioMed Central, PLoS). The OA pros and cons are briefly discussed emphasizing the benefits of OA to medical research and practice.