Quote:
Originally Posted by johnt
Time after time I find a reference to a scientific paper which I'd like to follow up, only to find that access to it is blocked by a pay wall.
Is there a legal way around this?
Do the Parkinson's organizations have group subscriptions?
Has anyone from the forum contacted the journals to get free access for PwP? (If not, I'll be happy to approach some UK journals.)
It is especially troubling when the research has been funded by public money. It reduces our ability to understand our own condition and decreases the effectiveness of our own research.
John
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Since 2008, the NIH has had a Public Access Policy that requires scientists to submit their peer-reviewed journal articles that are a result of NIH funded research to PubMed Central , where the articles are freely available to the public. If you search on PubMed and an article is available full text, there’s a link from Pub Med to the full text.
So there are more articles becoming available now, but the problem is that the authors have 12 months from publication date to submit . the most recent, cutting edge articles probably aren’t going to be available. It’s a start though.
Maybe we should lobby the NIH to do away with the 12 month delay? I think though this was included to placate the journal publishers, who don’t like giving anything away for free – so it would be an uphill battle. Researchers might also be encouraged to publish their studies with one of the open access publishers, like Public Library of Science or BioMed Central ?
If you need an article that’s not available through these resources, in the U.S. at least, you can often go to your public library and request it through Inter-library loan. Most libraries provide this service for free. The articles are often sent electronically and usually are received quickly. Libraries in the UK and other countries are likely to have a similar type of service .
Linda (who used to be a librarian )