Michael Woods, Access to latest research opened to consumers, Toledo Blade, February 21, 2005. Excerpt: 'The time-honored system for spreading information about new ways to prevent, diagnose, and treat diseases is undergoing a major change. Information is power, as the saying goes, and a new Federal Government policy on public access to research findings will give consumers more power to make decisions about their own health. The policy eliminates a barrier that hindered access to the latest medical research reports....Just get on the Internet and search PubMed (www.nih.gov), the treasure-trove of medical research reports at the National Library of Medicine (NLM). Keyboard a topic into the search page (weight-loss diets, Alzheimer's disease, diabetes, arthritis, lung cancer, or any other medical term), and the system produces summaries of major research done on that topic. Click for the full report, however, and you usually get the web site of the journal publisher, which charges a fee to view the complete text. Consumers and medical people do have alternatives. They can go to a medical library, request the journal, and make a photocopy. They also can subscribe to the journal, for sticker shock fee that often is hundreds of dollars a year. The system wasn't fair. Consumers' Federal income taxes pay for the research. Why should they have to pay again to see the results? That's the rational[e] behind the new policy, announced in February....NIH should take a lesson from [PLoS], and ask scientists to include a nonprofessional's summary of the research findings. That would further increase access to research for which the public pays so dearly.'
Posted by
Peter Suber at 2/22/2005 03:01:00 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.
