Researchers at the UK's National Health Service (NHS) can, beginning this month, publish their findings for free in any of BioMed Central's 90 peer-reviewed journals. News of the partnership comes on the heels of the Public Library of Science's announcement that it will publish its own open-access journals, funded by a $9 million grant from the Moore Foundation (Nat. Med. 9, 154; February 2003).

BioMed Central, an online publisher, charges an article-processing fee to the author but the journals are freely available to its subscribers. Under the agreement, the author fee will be waived for the more than 1 million people on the NHS staff and will be replaced by a membership fee for the organization as a whole.

The NHS provides free medical care in Britain—a costly endeavor. The agreement with BioMed Central is an opportunity to save money from journal subscriptions and the cost of publications, the organization says, allowing NHS funds to be more focused on patient care and health services. NHS researchers are not obligated to publish in open-access journals, however.

Fees for BioMed Central's institutional membership range from $1,550 per year for very small institutions—defined by the number of faculty, students and postdoctoral fellows in medicine and biology—to $7,750 for very large institutions (more than 5,000 researchers). The NHS joins 113 other members, including the World Health Organization, the US National Institutes of Health and other top research institutes.