... [M]y father was a scientist too --- an MD who did research at the NIH ... Given my propensities for putting things on the web and trying to disseminate scientific information, I came up with a plan last night to create some sort of web page in his honor with some information about his work and his life. ...
So, of course, being the obsessed Open Access advocate, the first thing I decided to look at was what publications of my father's I could get my hands on. ...
So - my first step in this journey was to search Pubmed ... I was left with 35 publications in PubMed ... So then I asked - which of these were available online in one way or another. According to Pubmed 24/35 were available online. Of those available online:
Pubmed Central: 3
Free access: 13
Fee access: 8
Unavailable: 11
This made me both happy and sad. I was glad to see some of his publications in Pubmed Central ... It was also good to see many available for free, even if this was only at some journals site. ... But I was a bit saddened to see how many of his papers, which are now all over 20 years old, being available only for a fee. And I was also a bit saddened to see how many had not yet made it into the digital world.
So - what to do next? ... [M]y first step was to see if any of the ones that Pubmed did not have links for might be available online anyway. And indeed a few were. ...
So for those 7 that are currently unavailable (at least anywhere I could find) digitally, my next step is to try and lobby the journals to make them available ... although some of the journals seem to not exist anymore ...
My next goal is to see if the "free" access journals have any plans to submit stuff to Pubmed Central. ...
My final initial goal, and probably the most challenging, is to figure out ways to make the papers that are current "fee for access" available for free. ...
So right now, the process is incomplete. I am actually learning a good deal about OA from looking into older papers rather than just all the new papers I tend to focus on. And hopefully in the process I can free up all of my father's papers so that his scientific legacy does not fade away as rapidly due to lack of access. And then next maybe I can focus on my grandfather's publications. ...
Posted by
Gavin Baker at 6/16/2008 09:47:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
