Reproductive System & Sexual Disorders: Current Research
Open Access

Recurrent Spontaneous Abortion Open Access Articles

Recurrent Spontaneous Abortion,definite as 2 or additional repeated pregnancy losses, disturbs about 2-3% of women attaining pregnancy. The experience takes a heavy emotional, physical and financial toll on patients and their families. Presently accepted testing for uterine anatomic abnormalities, Antiphospholipid antibodies (APA) and karyotypic abnormalities of the parents leave about 50% of RSA unexplained. The absence of pure causality and treatment to prevent recurrence episodes adds to the load of this diagnosis. Open access to the scientific literature means the removal of barriers (including price barriers) from accessing scholarly work. There are two parallel “roads” towards open access: Open Access articles and self-archiving. Open Access articles are immediately, freely available on their Web site, a model mostly funded by charges paid by the author (usually through a research grant). The alternative for a researcher is “self-archiving” (i.e., to publish in a traditional journal, where only subscribers have immediate access, but to make the article available on their personal and/or institutional Web sites (including so-called repositories or archives)), which is a practice allowed by many scholarly journals. Open Access raises practical and policy questions for scholars, publishers, funders, and policymakers alike, including what the return on investment is when paying an article processing fee to publish in an Open Access articles, or whether investments into institutional repositories should be made and whether self-archiving should be made mandatory, as contemplated by some funders.