...I [am] somewhat depressed over something I did Sunday night. I decided to remove myself from the UC Davis internet proxy to see how many of my past papers that I have published I can obtain without the UC subscriptions. So I went to pubmed, and typed in my name (Eisen JA) and got most of my papers, which are listed at the bottom of this blog....And then I went to see how many of my papers were freely available and how many were not. What I was most interested in was - what is the deal with papers I wrote before becoming an Open Access convert? For many it is easy to figure out if they are freely available - Pubmed has a link saying "Free in PMC" which refers to Pubmed Central. For others, it was a little trickier.
The results were both good and bad and a summary is below. A few things struck me. First, a lot of my life's work is not readily available without paying other for it. In the day and age of the internet, this means that these papers will simply be read less and less as time goes by. And that makes me very sad. If I had chosen to publish those papers in other journals, anyone in the world could get them at any time. Thankfully I did publish many papers in journals like PNAS, and ASM journals, and NAR - journals that have now decided to release them to Pubmed Central. And also thankfully (but less so) I published some papers in journals that have at least made them freely available on their web sites.
Most surprisingly to me is that a reasonable number of my papers in Nature are freely available on the Nature web site as part of their Genomics Gateway program. Nature deserves serious kudos for doing this and they stand out compared to Elsevier journals (which do not seem to ever do this) and even Science. This is disappointing as Science is published by a scientific society but apparently does not seem to care much about access to publications....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 11/29/2006 09:41:00 AM.
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.
