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

This has kept me PO'd for years. If you factor in tax payer support such as building the darned university and the road that leads to it, every study has been subsidized. But some sort of cozy relationship exists that results in about three big companies holding the copyrights and charging dearly for them. And there is a constant pressure to tighten up the paywalls too. -rick

A member posted this site years ago, but I don't know if it has the kinds of info you are looking for.
http://www.doaj.org/doaj?func=home&uiLanguage=en

Girija suggested writing to the author listed as contact person and request a copy

we have 3 college librarians who have access to much. I also suggest that you join the pipeliner email list. there's no onligation and we have many complete artiicles in our yahoo database.


email linda herman and she can set you up or peg willocks or carolyn stephenson.

paula

Johnt,

I have found that if you bypass those publishing "services" that want you to pay $30 an article, but instead go right to the journal's web page often they provide free access to archived volumes.

If you see some thing that you absolutely must read there is a new rental service called DeepDyve. You may rent for up to seven days, I believe.

It has annoyed me too on being shut out but realize it is the last thing doctors want (or lawyers)...in taking a more active role we undermine their authority.

Laura

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 )