The Bahrain Medical Bulletin (BMB - www.bahrainmedicalbulletin.com) has become an open access journal and is free to read online.

It is published under a progressive copyright that allows readers to reuse the articles provided they cite them correctly.

'This change is part of BMB's belief that medical research is an international public resource and should be provided with a copyright license that supports sharing of scientific knowledge.' said Dr Jaffar Al-Bareeq, chief editor of BMB.

Dr Al-Bareeq founded the journal in 1979 to provide a forum for medical research in the region.

Starting with the December 2008 issue, all BMB articles are freely available online and deposited in a public archive immediately upon publication. Anyone is free to copy, distribute, and reuse BMB content as long as he or she credits the original author and source.

'Open access publishing brings the same revolution to the publishing of scientific information that open source software brought to the creation of software', said Dr Mohammad Al-Ubaydli, a senior editor at BMB.

Dr Al-Ubaydli led the conversion of BMB to an open access journal. He is author of the book Free Software for Busy People (www.freedomsoftware.info) which discusses the use of open source software in health care.

This conversion is funded by grants from the Kuwait Finance House and the Ministry of Health.

This commitment to access to knowledge by a Bahraini journal complements Bahrain's existing medical infrastructure. For example, the only Cochrane Center in the Middle East is in Bahrain. Cochrane is the international collaboration between medical scientists around the world to evaluate and identify clinical treatments for patient care.-TradeArabia News Service