Forum index

July 2004

"Open Access - a bystander's view"

I have been engaged for the past ten years in researching the literature on gender and sexual dimorphism, independently of any academic institution. Consequently I have to pay for it myself.

True, I can obtain papers through my local library for about £2 but I have to wait months for them. The internet allows me to download individual papers, or order them direct from the British Library whose service is exemplary. Recently they obtained about a dozen pages from a nineteenth century book within a few days - and even phoned me to make sure they had provided the right ones!

I have always accepted that publishers and authors put a great deal of effort into producing the work and have never balked at a paying a small fee, £10-20 for a full article, as with Nature. I do object however to paying for a "Letter to the Editor" of about three paragraphs, as happened recently with Elselvier.

As for the idea that "Patients would be confused if they were to have free access to the peer-reviewed medical literature on the web" . . . .There have been a number of recent occasions when studies have received much publicity in the press, but were so badly misrepresented - on one occasion by the University's own Press Office - that I ordered the papers to find out what the researchers had actually said.

Yours sincerely,

Jed Bland