A major chunk of what I write about on this blog is the latest research in interesting fields around workplace life. The academic world produces some fascinating insights, but getting hold of the research papers to review the work is often far from easy.
Whilst there is a substantial movement to make research more open and available, a good number of papers still find themselves paywalled behind the journal that published them.
That typically requires you to go through the lengthy process of talking to the authors and trying to get hold of a copy direct from them. Whilst it’s always nice to talk to academics, it does add some time to the process.
Enter the Open Access Button
The Open Access Button may therefore be something of a saviour. It’s a plug-in that you attach to your browser of choice, and when you get stuck behind a paywall of a paper you’d fancy reading, you click the button, and they do their best to locate the paper in free form somewhere on the web.
The makers suggest that many papers are available online for free, but often lack the formatting and so on that they have when published in journal form, or they may be prior to peer-review.
For instance, they may be on the authors website or in a research repository of some kind. Now of course, you could do this kind of research yourself, which I have on many occasions, but this button pledges to do the leg work for you.
If the button can’t locate a free copy for you, then they do their best to create one for you. This is quite something in its own right, as you can imagine it’s not all that easy to do. It will involve a number of steps:
- Firstly they’ll email the author and see if they’re ok with making the paper available to the public. If they agree, this will then be shared with the community.
- They then create a dedicated web page for that paper, which will hopefully have all of the details about it, and the author can simply add their paper to it.
- The paper will then have some additional information attached to it, such as comments from those that have read it, a summary of facts contained within the paper and so on.
All of which sounds very cool indeed. They’ve got an advocacy page, so if you’re interested in open access research, do please stop by and join the case.
https://openaccessbutton.org/action
What a great idea. Love it.
It is a super idea. I'm looking forward to trying it out over the next few weeks.
Fantastic idea. Downloaded that.
I thought you'd like it Nick. Hope you enjoy trying it out.
Great idea. Anything that can make research more accessible has to be a good thing!
A recent study paid for by the European Commission, and conducted and published by (the non-peer reviewed site) Science-Metrix, has found that more than half (approximately 55 percent) of peer-reviewed research articles that were originally published between the years 2007-2012 can now be accessed free of charge somewhere on the Internet
Nice to see progress being made. Thanks for sharing Andrea.
As another successful Open Access Week passes, analysis released today reveals younger researchers are embracing change in scholarly communication. Just under 8,000 researchers from around the world responded to the 2014 Taylor & Francis Open Access Survey, giving their views on everything from the benefits of open access to licence preferences, peer review to the future of academic publishing. The overall results showed that whilst positivity was growing, uncertainty remained. But among the youngest respondents this uncertainty seems to be diminishing, as they embrace open access and the different options that are now available to them when they publish their research.
Certainly a positive sign. Thanks for sharing Paul.
Whilst this seems a great idea, I haven't got it to find a single open article yet. Kinda defeats the purpose of it.