Sir

Your Briefing indicates that one promising model for Internet publishing is to ask authors to pay page (as well as figure and table) charges, so reducing the journal's costs. We see two serious flaws with this approach.

First, as long as there are journals that do not require page charges, journals that do so will compete at a serious disadvantage for quality manuscripts. Second, the charge per page will jeopardize the ability of an enormous body of authors — namely those from developing nations — to publish in such journals. This is all the more relevant because the Internet frees publishers to a large extent from the onerous page limit restrictions of the printed medium, greatly reducing costs.

We have opted in Ciencia al Día, a new electronic-only journal published in Spanish (and soon to be translated into English), to publish free of page charges and at no cost to the reader (http://www.ciencia.cl/CienciaAlDia/). This should help to narrow the South-to-North knowledge gap discussed by Vanderlei Canhos and colleagues (Nature 397, 201;201 1999). In addition, the authors retain their copyrights and can publish the material elsewhere if they desire.