Email
Some say the meek will inherit the earth but in fact it will be the young. More especially, those young people who know their way around computer technology and who have sparks of imagination and creativity.
We have see this already among independent music and film makers and the bright young things who founded the computer companies and internet businesses that have changed the world. That change is also enveloping the business of scholarly publishing, where the 350 year old practice of distributing research results in journals printed on paper is disappearing fast. It’s not just that research is appearing on screens instead of the printed page — the whole approach to the dissemination of information is being transformed. Rather than charging readers for access, through a dysfunctional market that generates rich pickings for large publishing corporations off the back of unsustainable prices rises, the move now is to lever the power of the internet to facilitate free or open access for readers.
This shift entails a complex series of challenges to many entrenched business practices and aspects of academic culture. I won’t go into the details here (those who are interested should start out with this accessible overview from Peter Suber), but one of the most remarkable and valuable features of this transformation that the push to open access is coming from ground level, from the people who understand the internet best.
Today sees a further instance of that in the launch of a web-tool called the Open Access Button, an idea that germinated in the minds of two undergraduate medical students, David Carroll and Joseph McArthur earlier this year. That it has been developed and realised within a few short months is a testament to their energy and imagination but also to their ability to harness the loose social networks of supporters and experts that cluster so readily on the web these days.
I was fortunate to hear Carroll speak about the project in October at an Open Access meeting organised by Garrett McMahon at Queen’s University (video - his talk starts at 2:39:30) and was struck by his passion and idealism — that’s the young for you — and by his sheer delight at the fact that he and McArthur had been able to make their project happen by recruiting support from across the globe. This is the way things are done now.
The idea arose when Carroll and McArthur attended a conference in Washington DC run by the student-led charity Medsin, which aims to tackle health inequalities, met Nick Shockey of the Right to Research Coalition and got a crash course in the problems generated by publishers’ subscriptions. In a nutshell, the subscription model of academic publication is now increasingly seen as an impediment rather than a spur to research.
Collisions with publishers' paywalls occur regularly, not just for members of the public with limited or zero access to university libraries, but also for researchers, both rich and poor, whose libraries cannot maintain subscriptions to every journal. Each instance might be relatively minor; it may be possible, for example, to find a way round the impasse by emailing the author to request a copy of the sought-after article. But in totality the paywalls are a brake on research progress and the speed of dissemination to anyone who might wish to make use of it. Given that much of this research is funded publicly or charitably, many people feel it should be possible to come up with a better system using the connectivity provided by the web. This is particularly evident to young people. As Carroll put it in his talk, “Paywalls conflict with the power of the internet that I have grown up with.”
The OA button is here to help. It is not a perfect or total solution to the problem of access but it aims to turn each frustrated collision with a publisher’s paywall into a piece of data and, at the same time, to assist the searcher to find the paper they are looking for. The OA button is a bookmarklet that you simply drag to the toolbar of your browser. If you find yourself at a paywall, typically asking for $30-40 for a single article, clicking the button will log the details of the encounter — the article, your location and your reason for trying to access it — and will then help you to try to find the article using Google Scholar, which in my experience does a decent job of finding free author-deposited versions of the paper where these exist. If this should fail, the plan also is to facilitate a direct email request to the author for a copy of the paper.
The use of the button will help more people to find research papers. But just as importantly, it will generate worldwide data on the extent of the paywall problem. By exposing the problem, the button should add to the push for change. McArthur acknowledges that in the early days the button may get most use from advocates of open access so there is some risk of bias in the data that it generates, but the hope is that use will spread worldwide. The risks of bias can in any case be mitigated because, true to the internet zeitgeist and their open access principles, Carroll and McArthur have determined that all the raw data generated from the OA button will be made freely available to anyone.
This is the way things are done now.
@Stephen_Curry is a professor of structural biology at Imperial College, vice-chair of Science is Vital and a director of CaSE.
;