As a graduate student I have free access through my Universities library to any journal I want (well, most of them anyway).  But, not everyone has this luxury including most readers of the blogs here on Scientificblogging.com.  If I write an article here with a reference at the bottom to an article in a Springer Journal (I’m not pointing fingers … actually, I AM pointing fingers), then nearly no one is going to be able to go and read the original source article themselves–it’s way too expensive.  With these articles, anyone anywhere can access them for free.

I believe the free and open access to high-level research is immensely important in a democracy.

PhysMath Central (from the creators of BioMed Central) have recently launched a new Open Access journal, PMC BioPhysics.  This journal, like all journals at PhysMath and BioMed, is Zotero ready.  Very handy for those of us suffering from the perpetual problem of organizing our research collections.  By the look of the first issue, PCM Biophysics will likely be a very cool read, indeed.  Below”is the abstract to the article, “The multiple faces of self-assembled lipidic systems“.

Lipids, the building blocks of cells, common to every living organisms, have the propensity to self-assemble into well-defined structures over short and long-range spatial scales. The driving forces have their roots mainly in the hydrophobic effect and electrostatic interactions. Membranes in lamellar phase are ubiquitous in cellular compartments and can phase-separate upon mixing lipids in different liquid-crystalline states. Hexagonal phases and especially cubic phases can be synthesized and observed in vivo as well. Membrane often closes up into a vesicle whose shape is determined by the interplay of curvature, area difference elasticity and line tension energies, and can adopt the form of a sphere, a tube, a prolate, a starfish and many more. Complexes made of lipids and polyelectrolytes or inorganic materials exhibit a rich diversity of structural morphologies due to additional interactions which become increasingly hard to track without the aid of suitable computer models. From the plasma membrane of archaebacteria to gene delivery, self-assembled lipidic systems have left their mark in cell biology and nanobiotechnology; however, the underlying physics is yet to be fully unraveled.

Sound cool?  Hey, you can check out the whole article here for free.  Ah … freedom.