To see the papers that describe the latest science results, you need to have a subscription to the journals they're published in (or at least your library does). That leaves most of the public, and even many scientists, on the wrong side of a paywall from knowing the latest goings on in their fields.

To help speed the flow of scientific information, the National Institutes of Health has mandated a policy where any papers derived from research it funds are made public within a year of their publication; the Obama administration is now trying to expand that policy so it covers all federal agencies. Meanwhile, lots of journals have been founded that are open access from the start—as soon as a paper is available, anyone can download a copy.

There have been many developments in open access publishing lately, so we thought we'd do a rundown of the latest news.

PeerJ launches and expands. We covered the announcement of PeerJ, an open access journal that has a radically different model for financial support: researchers pay a membership fee, and can then publish as much as they want (memberships range for annual to lifetime). The journal has now officially launched, and has plenty of articles available for anyone to look at. And, since the launch, the people behind PeerJ have been busy.

One of the things they've done is launch a preprint server for biologists, similar to what physics has with the arXiv. Members can now put drafts of their papers up for public comment and feedback before they're ready for peer review and publishing. Many fields find this useful, but there's little experience with it in biology. Meanwhile, the membership model is getting some institutional support; four universities, including Duke and Arizona State, have paid enough so that all their faculty are now members and can publish as much as they want. PeerJ has also announced that any undergraduates can have membership for free if they do enough research to merit a publication.

BMC Biology turns 10 and looks at the challenges of peer review. One of the earliest open access journals, BMC Biology has just celebrated its 10th birthday (it's now owned by publishing giant Springer). It celebrated in part by hosting a panel discussion on whether peer review, at least in biology, is broken. One of the problems that researchers face is that reviewers have fallen into the habit of asking for more experiments to clarify issues and provide a broader picture of the topic of research. It's nice in principle, but can often mean months or more of experiments, several rounds of review, and can drag the publication process out to well over a year.

BMC Biology's solution to this is to allow the author to ask the journal's editors to step in. Once one round of experiments are done in response to critiques, the authors can request that the editor decide whether the effort was sufficient. If the revised paper gets an editorial thumbs-up, the paper's published, with no return trip to reviewers.

eLife launches with a new review model. eLife is another new open access journal, this one with a simple business model: get some money from the organizations that pay for a lot of bioscience research (like the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Wellcome Trust, and Max Planck Institute). The journal has now launched, and is taking another approach to peer review. Most journals have three reviewers, each of which typically provides a different list of concerns and requests for additional information. The researchers are typically left guessing as to which issues are serious, which ones aren't major priorities, and which ones are completely misguided.

For papers reviewed at eLife, they don't have to guess; the reviewers have to get together (virtually) and discuss their individual complaints, then create a consensus review. This, ideally, tells the authors exactly what they need to do in order to have the paper published.

F1000 goes from pre-prints to real prints. F1000 research is yet another open access journal with a distinctive take on publishing and reviewing papers. It is also operating a pre-print server for papers that are in draft form. When the paper is complete, however, authors can just press a button and request review. If enough of the reviewers approve it (or approve it with reservations), the paper is then deemed "published" and submitted to the NIH for indexing. And the reviews get published right next to the paper (a process called open review), so that anyone can see what, precisely, those reservations are.

Nature Publishing goes open access. The Nature Publishing Group (which is behind—wait for it—Nature and a host of other high-quality journals) isn't quite ready to let its top end journals leave paywalls behind. But it is interested in the potential of open access publishing. So, it has decided to invest in an open access publisher called Frontiers, which has a large collection of journals in the sciences and medicine. The publications of the Frontiers journals are all covered by a Creative Commons license.

Growth comes with some growing pains. With its growing popularity, open access has attracted some people looking to make a quick buck. The New York Times recently ran an article about how some researchers were lured into publishing in journals that then tried to charge them hefty (and apparently undisclosed fees) to publish there. Similar things are going on with academic conferences, which may invite people to take part, then charge them hefty registration fees. In some cases, the conferences are set up to appear to be existing ones.

Meanwhile, the federal government's open access policy may be having more of an effect on publishers than was thought. The FASEB Journal recently ran an article claiming that journal articles that appear in the NIH's article archive see fewer downloads from the journals in which they were originally published. Which may, in the long term, cut down on the need for universities to subscribe to these journals.

Ironically, The FASEB Journal made that article open access.