Background
Fifteen years ago, most publications were paper-based, accessible only by subscription - be it a personal or a library subscription. By the late 1990s, this 'traditional' mode of access to scientific literature was about to change dramatically, as the result of a combination of events: the improvement of personal computer hardware (with computers becoming faster and cheaper every year), public access to internet and the world-wide web, online publishing and, most of all, the will of the scientific community to make research more easily available. This has led to the development of Open Access (OA). This revolution in publishing has given developing countries an opportunity to have access to the latest scientific literature, by-passing the need for libraries, which they could not afford.
Once 'traditional' publishers had started to produce their journals in an online format, it became possible to consider making them available free-of-charge or at low-cost to readers outside the industrialized world: this was first achieved in 2000, through the HINARI Initiative, a partnership between the World Health Organization and a number of publishers. It was a step in the right direction, but was far from providing the desired unlimited access.
In 1997, the U.S. National Library of Medicine made MEDLINE, the most comprehensive index to medical literature, freely available online in the form of PubMed: as a result, the usage of this database increased 100-fold overnight. Since access to research abstracts alone is insufficient, this quickly led to the recognition of the need for an open online repository of full articles, which was realized as PubMedCentral. Once this was in place, Vitek Tracz, the chairman of a UK-based publishing company, was able to launch BioMed Central in 2000. BioMed Central which is now part of the Springer Group, publishes 206 peer-reviewed Open Access journals, including Malaria Journal, started in 2002, and Parasite & Vectors, started in 2008. The fact that articles in BioMed Central journals are immediately backed-up in the PubMed Central repository provides them with a long-term security other online journals may not provide.
The Open Access concept really gained momentum when funding agencies in many countries, including the Wellcome Trust, the Department of Health and the Medical Research Council in the UK, made it a requirement in 2006 for the research they had financed to become freely available in open access, not later than six months after its publication. This has forced many 'traditional' non-OA journals to make articles available in limited open access, after an embargo period of 6-12 months or longer. The alternative to publishing in a journal that provides immediate OA to all of its articles on the publisher's website (such as BioMed Central's journals), is for the author to 'self-archive' in a repository (for example, in an institutional repository or in PubMed Central).
The creation of the Public Library of Science (PLoS) in 2001, initially as an organization to advocate Open Access publication, led to the creation of a number of PLoS journals initially aimed firmly at the 'high quality end' of the scientific spectrum. The launch of these new journals, together with the wide range of OA journals started a few years earlier by BioMed Central, has changed the scientific publication scene forever.