Team Button Tuesdays: Penny and Minuette | Open Access Button blog

"Open Access is vital to me. I didn’t discover it as a student, or a librarian or as an academic. I didn’t graduate until I was 32. I started studying to be a librarian last September I didn’t start officially being a researcher until March this year (I’m a research assistant on a project where all the outputs will be made available openly). My OA story goes a bit further back. I’m autistic, which means I have 'special interests' that require me to know everything about them, and I’m a nerd, so ditto. Ever since I first got the internet during my first attempt at university way back in 1998 when I was 17, the internet has been the extension of my brain. Of course I used it to feed my obsessions. It wasn’t long before the days of 'I appear to have read the entire internet' were over, and Google started being useful (before it started being evil) and threw up hundreds of thousands of web pages for any topic I gave it. And not long after that, I started hitting paywalls. I’m not thick. I dropped out of the first year of university twice, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t understand these things called abstracts that would sometimes turn up when I was searching for information about my interests. It happened even more often when trying to find out more about the diagnosis of cerebral palsy I was given at 20, or my diagnosis of Asperger Syndrome at 30. Over time, these abstracts stopped being just adverts for print resources and there was an invitation to read the full text. Only that came with a huge price tag, and I was unemployed – only 15% of people with autism are employed full time. I didn’t have a rich mum and dad who could put articles on credit cards, I was a free school meals kid. When I started finding OA copies of these articles, I started to feel included. I could read this stuff at last and not just what other people said about that stuff in the media; the actual research itself. This was the rise of repositories in action – on the whole it was pre- and post-prints I was finding, along with the odd completely free gold OA journal formed by interest groups or universities. Not being a scientist until later, that’s not unexpected. I started to feel indignant that it wasn’t like this for everything I wanted and needed to read and annoyed that seemingly useful articles I found for other people – ever the librarian – were only available to people who worked at universities that had subscriptions. So I got my degree, with the Open University, knowing I could complete it this time because I could read and understand research papers. I started training to become a librarian. I worked in a repository. And I started volunteering for the Open Access Button, because so many people I met, both academics and librarians, couldn’t really see the problem and thought OA was some fad or distraction instead of absolutely vital to people like me who existed outside the academy with no access to research for over 20 years. The Button maps the problem, and it does what I’ve been doing for myself and others for years – tries to find a legal Open copy for users and show authors that people want them to publish Open Access or at least self-archive in Open repositories.. Now people are starting to get it ..."