The importance of disclosing the conflict of interest (CoI) in the era of open access publishing

In pharmacological and biomedical sciences, most of the principle donators are progressively demanding open access as a condition in economical support, something which has already become common in various other areas1. The expression “open access” has been used since 2002: first in the Budapest Open Access Initiative (February 2002), then in the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing (June 2003) and finally in the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities (October 2003). Open access was initially intended for scholarly journal manuscripts in order to provide an unrestricted online access to them. However, even though this term first appeared in the 2000s, free on-line access to journal manuscripts had started at least 10 years previously