... [Today] I was speaking to some friends at a medical school in India. I’ve been railing for a decade against the crime of scientific publishers making money from restricting access to scientific research funded with public money, but I felt it inside me as a result of this call.
The medical school has problems getting access to research published in journals. ...
They had heard that if you could supply a secure IP address you could get access to journals through the British Library. I said that I thought that unlikely but would find out from the library. I rang them, and a knowledgeable and helpful woman explained things to me.
It isn’t possible to get access to all journals online through the British Library, but the library does have a document delivery service. It can deliver almost any article within a few days - for a charge. These articles can be emailed either to a secure IP address or to any email address if encrypted. The charge is £9 plus VAT plus the copyright charge of the publisher, “and,” she said apologetically, “that might be quite high, up to £20 for the big commercial publishers.” The copyright fee can, however, be waived if the institution is something like a medical school.
This seemed promising, although galling, to me, but the twist I felt deeply was that the fee would not be waived for even medical schools if the article was going to be emailed. It could then only be posted or faxed, and faxing is more expensive. This twist of the publishers seemed to me particularly cruel.
That kick made me decide to redouble my commitment to making sure that all research is available open access. ...
Posted by
Gavin Baker at 9/08/2009 10:26:00 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.
