Category — Lack of Access

Ed.: I’m pleased to welcome our next guest blogger, Gloria Tavera. Ms. Tavera is an undergraduate studying neurobiology, political science, and public health at the University of Florida. She also serves as chair of UAEM-UF, the Universities Allied for Essential Medicines chapter at the University of Florida.

Opinions are solely those of the author.

You’re looking for academic articles in a peer reviewed journal, perhaps you even have some titles and authors picked out. You think you’ve found the article and…click, click, then, “Please choose the appropriate price according to the kind of subscription you like and the area of your address of residence”. At $30 a paper? Forget it. Whether you’re researching for a class or trying to look for papers related to your latest lab experiment, open access could make things a whole lot easier.

In 2006, at my own school, University of Florida, budget cuts nearly forced the library to cancel almost $750,000 in online journal subscriptions. It’s infuriating that we had to have hundreds of thousands of dollars to pay for access in the first place.

As far as I can see, the journal publisher’s business model is antiquated and counter-productive—it’s out with the old and in with the new. It practically blows my mind that such a backwards idea could persist in a community where it’s particularly important to share information and ideas.

It’s good to know that PLoS is around, the Directory of Open Access Journals and some OA articles, but despite OA’s growth, we’re still far from 100% OA.

For students, one of the most exciting parts about the open access campaign is the potential to make a lasting difference, while still an undergraduate/graduate student at a university. I’m currently working on a campaign, with Universities Allied for Essential Medicines (UAEM), to get universities to sign on to generic licensing of their biotech to impoverished nations and nations in health crises. UAEM is a non-profit who works with student and faculty groups across the U.S. and Canada to construct creative new approaches to improving the development and delivery of public health goods. The similarities between our campaign and the potential student campaign for open access are striking.

Both have an extremely just cause, especially within the university context: ethically, you really can’t argue with what open access is about: making knowledge accessible to the public is one of the grand missions of institutions of higher education.

Another point: if you can educate and gain support from a large number of faculty (especially research faculty) at your university, your campaign is almost guaranteed to succeed. Despite how monolithic university administration may seem, they do work hard to maintain good relations with their researchers. If enough (or highly influential) researchers come to them with complaints about the way the current system works, the university will be much more receptive to the open access campaign.

A final thought: the open access campaign can also be fought in the classroom. Students can work with their professors to design and/or integrate open access education and use of open access-only materials in classes. Professors who teach classes on how to write papers and do research should adopt at least some open access coursework Into their material. Making a difference could be as simple as reaching out to them.

A recent interview with Bora Zivkovic has an important reminder for every student. (Zivkovic is the author of A Blog Around the Clock, a science blog, and Online Community Manager for the open access journal PLoS ONE.)

The reminder is: Your library card expires when you graduate.

Back in grad school I was a fanatical downloader and reader of scientific papers. I read papers old and new in my field, in several related fields, and in some unrelated but interesting fields. I read, carefully, several papers per day. Then, a few months after I left grad school and started science blogging, my password expired for the school library and suddenly I realized what I never thought of before — papers are actually NOT free and available for everyone to read. And I needed my daily dose of papers, both for blogging and for my, at the time, illusion of writing a Dissertation. I had to resort to begging friends for PDFs.

If you think that everyone should have access to the scientific literature, even if they’re not students, then you should support open access. Because one day, you won’t be a student either…