Mapping Open Access, or the lack thereof | MobyLives

"Just how many scholars and researchers are running into paywalls as they go about their work? A new initiative, the Open Access Button, is in the process of making it very clear. Launched on Tuesday, the Open Access Button is a browser bookmarklet (which doesn’t sound like a real thing, but is) to be used like so: whenever a researcher encounters a paywall, they click the button, and their individual moment of frustration and denial is added to a world map. They’re given the option of adding a bit about their particular experience: who they are and what they’re looking for. And then, so the process has short-term benefits for the researcher as well, they also receive a link that suggests ways to find the paywalled material for free. The Open Access Button is a project originally conceived of by two British med students, David Carroll of Queens University Belfast and Joseph McArthur of University College London, who found that, despite the fact that they attend large institutions that are able to subscribe to many major journals and databases, they were still running into material they couldn’t access without paying fees. And they realized that this was an issue whose real size could be represented: instead of these searches leading nowhere and disappearing (converted only, perhaps, into wide-margined thesis papers and very expensive ulcers), all the individual instances could be collected, over time, as they happen ..."