Can Your Doctor See the Cancer Research Reported in the News? Can you? – Medium

"Inspired by Vice President Biden’s Moonshot Initiative, we asked: How common are such paywalls for the latest research articles on cancer? To find out, we looked at news stories published in 2016 with 'cancer' in their headlines that contained a link to a research article. Using data on online media mentions provided by Altmetric, we found 67,236 news stories with links to 11,523 different journal articles. We then used a new service, oaDOI, provided by ImpactStory combined with automated efforts to locate a freely available PDF on the article’s page, to determine the percentage of articles that the public could read without being asked for payment by the publisher*.

Turns out paywalls are not uncommon. The blocked NEJM breast cancer article was not a fluke. For our sample, over 60% of the articles were behind paywalls. This number goes up slightly, to 63% for the articles that are mentioned in 50 or more news stories.

Overall these articles heralded from a variety of sources, including traditional news sources (e.g., New York Times, Washington Post) and online-only new sites, such as Slate, Huffington Post and Vox. For articles behind paywalls, readers are generally given the option to subscribe to the journal, buy the article, or 'rent' the article for a specific time period. For purchasing an article, readers can expect fees between $30-$50 per article. Or readers may face a confusing array of price options with off-putting registration and restriction requirements. All this for what should be a simple right of access to research produced within public-sector support."