Hit the Button for Open Access

Most researchers have hit a paywall at least once, which for open access advocates is one time too many. These paywalls, with costs often insurmountable for an individual purchase, precludes access and halts the spread of research. Each person who is denied access to scholarly content is an indictment of our current scholarly communication system. We all know the story: increasing costs of journal subscriptions are unsustainable and overpriced research impedes reader access, particularly  for the  scientists and scholars who depend on scholarly content for their own work.

“Disruption” has become a prevalent term to illustrate the interference of access to research in the scholarly communication process. Heather Morrison, open access blogger at The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics, recently commented on the vast paywall inflicted on readers of the Journal of Comparative Neurology, a journal that charges $30,860 per yearly subscription, publishing 234 articles per year, keeping in mind the peer-review process is freely donated. She writes,

The Association of American Medical Colleges accredits 141 medical schools in the U.S. and Canada alone. If each one of these schools purchased a subscription at $30,860, that would add up to revenue of $4.3 million per year. $4.3 million would be sufficient to pay open access article processing fees for 1,657 articles at the rates of the professional for-profit BioMedCentral’s very-high-impact journal Genome Biology (U.S. $2,265).

One aspect of disrupting the system is to adapt the technology that supports it. Already one idea that is being adopted and integrated into various systems, including the University of Southhampton and DSpace, is the “Request a copy” button for repository software. This accomplishes what Steven Harnard has called the ID/OA model (immediate deposit, optional access) and helps allay author and institutional concerns about copyright infringements during publisher embargo periods and permits a post-print copy for the reader’s use. Two students out of colleges in the UK proposed the idea of an open access button, “a browser-based tool which tracks how often people are denied access to academic research.”

An additional technological innovation has come out of student participation in an Open Access Button Hackathon: London, England Sept 7/8. Programmers invited undergrads and grad students to globally join forces and expertise to create an access button that requests a post-print. One proposed tool will track how many denials to research and where on the globe, what professions, and why research is important to access. This map will collate the information at one location within an interactive interface. Read more about it on Open Knowledge Foundation blog.

It is these types of innovative ideas that will begin to positively affect the model of academic publishing that restricts access.