Open communities bring the Open Access Button to life - MyScienceNews

"David Carroll took a year out of his medical studies at Queen's University in Belfast to gain research experience in the lab. For his study on cystic fibrosis, he read only papers for which his university had a subscription or those published in open access. At $35 a paper, everything else written on the topic fell by the wayside. 'That gap in my knowledge probably ended my research,' he says, 'because I didn’t have the opportunity to read everything [that would help me] generate hypotheses. I could only use what I had.' Carroll’s experience is far from isolated, and yet, each collision with a paywall does remain isolated, leaving every researcher, journalist or citizen denied access to fume, alone, in front of the computer screen. Along with his friend and pharmacology student, Joe McArthur, David decided to turn the tables on this situation with a tool that will track article access attempts, creating a map of when, where and for whom that access is denied. The 'OA Button', as it is currently known, will also go out in search of a version of the publication that the user does have the right to view, in a university repository, perhaps, or a pre-print server. 'People advocating for open access will get what they want – data – plus people who want access will get the paper,' Carroll explains. A leg up from open source & open access Given their own very limited programming experience, the pair turned to the open source community to make their idea a reality. The recent BMJ hack day, hosted by the British Medical Journal on July 6 and 7 in London, 'exceeded our wildest expectations,' David Carroll says. 'We met really wonderful people, who are a lot more intelligent than we are, and in less than 30 hours had built this prototype.' Awarded 3rd prize by the hack day judges, the first map resulting from the OA Button appeared as BMJ’s image of the week on 13 July. One moment particularly struck David: The team had had their eye on a specialist with experience on similar projects, someone they could look to for assistance. Then, during the hack day, a 'stranger turned up on GitHub [the hosting service for software development projects], out of the blue, and completed one of the key functions for us, one that we were stuck on.' It turned out to be none other than the expert they had hoped to use as a resource. For help in the world of open source, sometimes you don’t even need to ask."