A journal editor would then remove the authors' names and affiliations from the paper and send it to their peers for review.

A team of researchers working together in the laboratory would submit the results of their research to a journal.

It used to be so straightforward.

Depending on the comments received, the editor would accept the paper for publication or decline it.

Copyright rested with the journal publisher, and researchers seeking knowledge of the results would have to subscribe to the journal.

No longer. The Internet -- and pressure from funding agencies, who are questioning why commercial publishers are making money from government-funded research by restricting access to it -- is making access to scientific results a reality.

The report, by John Houghton of Victoria University in Australia and Graham Vickery of the OECD, makes heavy reading for publishers who have, so far, made handsome profits.

The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has just issued a report describing the far-reaching consequences of this.

But it goes further than that.

It signals a change in what has, until now, been a key element of scientific endeavor.

The value of knowledge and the return on the public investment in research depends, in part, upon wide distribution and ready access.

It is big business. In America, the core scientific publishing market is estimated at between $7 billion and $11 billion.

This is now changing. According to the OECD report, some 75% of scholarly journals are now online.

They publish more than 1. 2 million articles each year in some 16, 000 journals.

The International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers says that there are more than 2, 000 publishers worldwide specializing in these subjects.

There is the so-called big deal, where institutional subscribers pay for access to a collection of online journal titles through site-licensing agreements.

Entirely new business models are emerging; three main ones were identified by the report's authors.

There is open-access publishing, typically supported by asking the author (or his employer) to pay for the paper to be published.

Other models exist that are hybrids of these three, such as delayed open-access, where journals allow only subscribers to read a paper for the first six months, before making it freely available to everyone who wishes to see it.

Finally, there are open-access archives, where organizations such as universities or international laboratories support institutional repositories.

All this could change the traditional form of the peer-review process, at least for the publication of papers.