I am often asked why can’t AJNR be entirely open access and free for all? There is a direct relationship between quality and freedom of access. To maintain the quality of AJNR we need editors, reviewers, copy editors, high quality paper, mailing materials and websites and obviously all of these cost money. Devotees of “free” fail to see (or deny) the logical relationship between quality and price. In this week’s New Yorker Magazine and today’s e-version of the New York Times this subject is dealt in reviews of a newly published book: Free: The Future of a Radical Price by Chris Anderson and published by Hyperion. The idea behind the book is that as bodies of information expand and their transmission accelerates, prices go down to basically almost free or completely free. Newspapers have almost ceased to exist in their traditional formats due to this idea. YouTube is free to you and me via subsidies gained by streaming other high-quality stuff (not homemade videos) with which advertisers want to be associated. I was surprised to learn that despite its nearly “universal” appeal and use, YouTube will still lose about half a billion dollars this year. Because YouTube is “free”, quality control is basically non-existent (Wikipedia suffers from a similar problem). In all of these alternative business paradigms money is being made, but not in the way that we all commonly think about or by those who have traditionally reaped the benefits. AJNR is, as are many other scientific journals, a high-quality product geared towards a selected and highly sophisticated group of professionals. Because of this, most of our subscribers understand that it cannot be offered entirely for free. Nevertheless, we strive to make nearly 50% of our contents open access.