One of the goals of establishing a digital library for the public health workforce is to improve access to electronic journals. Open access, “a publication model where in neither readers nor a reader's institution are charged for access to articles or other resources,” is currently a growing trend in scientific and scholarly publication (Library of Congress, 2004). Open access is particularly important to the public health workforce, who often lacks the funding needed to pay for expensive online institutional journal subscriptions.

Below is a list of the current electronic journals available free and full text online:

• Biomed Central
• Directory of Open Access Journals: Public Health 
• Free Medical Journals.com
• Highwire Press
• Lamar Soutter Library 
• Medscape (requires free registration)
• PubMed Central

You can view restricted access electronic journals using your King County Public Library Card; see the Libraries of Washington State website for a list of other libraries in the state. The library’s ProQuest database includes a number of public health oriented electronic journals. To obtain a library card, visit www.kcls.org/libcards/card.cfm

If you are interested in following the Open Access debate, visit the website of SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition at www.arl.org/sparc