"As a child I remember being fascinated by science, and developed an overwhelming urge to learn how everything worked. I loved science fiction, seeing authors explore the very edges of possible futures, extrapolating out the possibly feasible to its very limits. As I grew older and began a degree in Physics, I became even more certain I wanted to be a scientist and had a vision of what real science was all about. I remember the first few months of my PhD work being quite disappointing, learning that papers often lacked the necessary details to reproduce key reactions, or that I didn’t have access to certain papers due to their age or the journal they had been published in.
I worked hard on my research, wanting to have an impact and learn more about something I found interesting and that I hoped would one day result in new discoveries. Once I had enough results to publish, I began working on my very first paper, one that my supervisors encouraged me to publish in an appropriate journal for our research. I had never really considered the low level details of publication, but was shocked at how one-sided everything seemed to be...
Once I left academia I realized just how different the world was — the research I had conducted in the past was now inaccessible to me, stuck behind academic paywalls. In the past when I found a paper and the abstract looked interesting, I could simply click on the full text link and get the paper. If it turned out it was not very relevant (happened most of the time), I could close the article and keep searching. Now that I had lost my academic IP address, with all of the journals I had been accustomed to having “free access” to in an affluent Western university, I was restricted to gleaning what I could from abstracts and article graphics. I had become what Peter Murray-Rust termed 'scholarly poor,'
a highly qualified scientist essentially shut out of the scientific process due to the academic paywalls in place. I was no longer able to follow developments in my field, and should I choose to publish more articles about my research after leaving academia, I would also be unable to read it once published.We recently published a paper on Avogadro, a cross-platform, open-source molecular editor and analysis package. The paper summarized the results of approximately five years of development effort, spread between a distributed team with some applied hours and a lot of our spare time. We discussed several possible venues for this work, but one thing I was certain of was that I wanted to see it published in an open access journal and one that uses a liberal CC-BY license so that others can freely redistribute the article. I had co-authored a couple of papers with collaborators the year before in the Journal of Cheminformatics, and after some discussion, we decided that this would also be a great place for theAvogadro paper. The work we were publishing was somewhat different to the typical academic article, but, in my honest opinion, our core goals remained the same: to summarize what we had done, what we felt was novel, and to provide a reference that could be cited and built upon. One of the more difficult aspects for me as someone who works for a small business is how we fund the author publication fee, along with justifying the expense to our management. In this particular instance we were very lucky to be supported by an ongoing collaboration, but in the future I would like to have a strategy to allow us to publish open access articles. We must be able to show that the open access publisher is legitimate.."