Sexually transmitted diseases (STD) may cause severe disadvantages to pregnant women and their babies. STD can lead to maternal cancer, pelvic inflammatory disease and infertility; pregnancy dangers include preterm labor, premature falling-out of membranes and uterine infections. STD can be spread to the baby in-utero and during delivery. Fetal infectivity may cause low birth weight, conjunctivitis, blindness, pneumonia, sepsis, neurologic damage, fetal demise or stillbirth. 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.