The Open Access Irony Awards: Naming and shaming

“Open Access (OA) publishing aims to make the results of scientific research available to the widest possible audience. Scientific papers that are published in Open Access journals are freely available for crucial data mining and for anyone to read, wherever they may be.In the last ten years, the Open Access movement has made huge progress... But there is still a long way to go yet, as much of the world’s scientific knowledge remains locked up behind publisher’s paywalls, unavailable for re-use by text-mining software and inaccessible to the public, who often funded the research through taxation... Ironically, some of the papers that are inaccessible discuss or even champion the very Open Access movement itself... Sometimes the best way to make a serious point is to have a laugh and joke about it. This is what the Open Access Irony Awards...To get the ball rolling, here is are some examples: [1] The Lancet owned by Elsevier, recently  published a paper on “the case for open data” [2] (please login to access article). Perhaps Elsevier are using an ironically different definition of the word “open” to everyone else? [2] Serial offender and über-journal Science has an article by Elias Zerhouni on the NIH public access policy [3] (Subscribe/Join AAAS to View Full Text), another on “making data maximally available” [4] (Subscribe/Join AAAS to View Full Text) and another on a high profile advocate of open science[5] (Buy Access to This Article to View Full Text - Irony of ironies)... If you would like to nominate a paper for an Open Access Irony Award, simply post it to the group on Citeulike or group on Mendeley...”