Melanoma Open Access Articles

Melanoma is a particular type of skin cancer. It happens when the melanocytes (the pigment cells) become cancerous. Most pigment cells are found in the skin, although melanoma can also occur in the eyes (ocular melanoma) and other parts of the body. There are many types of skin cancer but, of all skin cancers melanoma is one of the common types, though it is much less common than basal cell and squamous cell skin cancers. Melanoma is a rarer but more dangerous type of skin cancer than other types due to its faster spreading nature. It is very rare in people with dark skin. Melanoma is the best known and most important skin cancer to prevent. The treatment of skin cancer is much similar to that of other cancers, except that the aim of skin cancer therapy is invariably to completely remove it, which is possible because of its location. The other less common treatments for skin cancer include chemotherapy, photodynamic therapy (light and drug therapy, but not against melanoma), biological therapy and, although not usually, rarely radiation therapy. 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.

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Last date updated on May, 2024