Walking the talk | Scholarly Communications @ Duke

"All of the presentations at the SPARC Open Access meeting this week were excellent.  But there was one that was really special; an early career researcher named Erin McKiernan who brought everyone in the room to their feet to applaud her commitment to open access.  We are sometimes told that only established scholars who enjoy the security of tenure can 'afford' to embrace more open ways to disseminate their work.  But Dr. McKiernan explained to us both the 'why' and the 'how' of a deep commitment to OA on the part of a younger scholar who is not willing to embrace traditional, toll-access publishing or to surrender her goals of advancing scholarship and having an academic career. Erin McKiernan is a Ph.D from the University of Arizona who is now working as a scientist and teacher in Latin America.  Her unique experience informs her perspective on why young scholars should embrace open access.  Dr. McKiernan is a researcher in medical science at the National Institute of Public Health in Mexico and teaches (or has taught) at a couple of institutions in Latin America.  For her, the issue is that open access is fundamental to her ability to do her job; she told us that the research library available to her and her colleagues has subscriptions to only 139 journals, far fewer that most U.S. researchers expect to be able to consult.  Twenty-two of that number are only available in print format, because electronic access is too expensive.  This group includes key titles like Nature and Cell.  A number of other titles that U.S. researchers take for granted as core to their work — she mentioned Nature Medicine and PNAS — are entirely unavailable because of cost.  So in an age when digital communications ought to, at the very least, facilitate access to information needed to improve health and treat patients, the cost of these journals is, in Dr. McKiernan’s words, 'impeding my colleagues’ ability to save lives.'  She made clear that some of these journals are so expensive that the choice is often between a couple of added subscriptions or the salary of a researcher. This situation ought to be intolerable, and for Dr. McKiernan it is.  She outlined for us a personal pledge that ought to sound quite familiar.  First, she will not write, edit or review for a closed-access journal. Second, she will blog about her scientific research and post preprints of her articles so that her work is both transparent and accessible.  Finally, she told us that if a colleague chose to publish a paper on which she was a joint author in a closed-access journal, she would remove her name from that work.  This is a comprehensive and passionately-felt commitment to do science in the open and to make it accessible to everyone who could benefit from it — clinicians, patients and the general public as well as other scholars ..."