This week, Nature launches an online forum on a topic that has filled volumes of conference proceedings and reams of individual articles since the emergence of the Internet — namely, the web's impact on the publishing of the results of original research.

The most recent and prominent manifestation of the debates surrounding this topic is an initiative by researchers to force publishers, by a threatened boycott, to release archived reports of original research into centralized, freely available and unrestricted databases, known as 'The Public Library of Science' (PLS). Nature's forum does not represent the response of our publishers, the Nature Publishing Group, to the PLS initiative. Nature's publishers are currently soliciting feedback from researchers, librarians and other interested parties in weighing up the issues. But, in principle, everyone in research has an interest in understanding the many aspects of those issues. So the focus of the forum is only partly on the debate between, for example, advocates of free access and those who worry about the loss of publishers' livelihood and ownership rights.

Accordingly, we have commissioned not only researchers and publishers but also experts in scientific information management and commerce to contribute. This week you can find the first contributions, including two views from the European Molecular Biology Organization, which is proposing its own model, to be funded by the European Union (see http://www.nature.com/nature/debates/e-access). We welcome original responses to the forum, bearing in mind our interest in exploring in more depth the many aspects of the online-access debate, rather than reiterating opinions on how that access should be shaped.