UPDATE: Venue: Find everything you need to know for the day here! http://oabutton.wordpress.com/2013/09/04/open-access-button-hackathon-everything-you-need-to-know/ UPDATE: Venue: Top Office Machines, 133–135 Bethnal Green Road, E2 7DG London, United Kingdom Millions of people a day are denied access to the research they both need and paid for because of paywalls.
Hey there! Welcome to the first of many Open Access Button Weekly updates. Throughout this project we’ve been blown away by the response of the OA community. Through twitter, blogs and chatting to folk the button is going to so much better than it ever could’ve been. We’d like these updates to be a window into what we’re doing — the successes and the challenges we’re facing.
If someone hits a paywall in the forest, does it make a sound?: The Open Access Button | The Student Blog.
We’ve all been there, dissertation pending, deadline approaching and coffee being demolished faster than is probably healthy. Then it happens. You hit a paywall — deadend. Frustration ensues, but no time, gotta move on. But wait, did you know you probably paid for that research. Millions of pounds of taxpayers money each year goes on publicly funded research. So why can’t you access it? The answer is the broken scholarly publishing system.
David and Joseph from the Open Access Button team are in Budapest at the Right to Research Coalition General Assembly. You can watch a short interview with them below.
This week David was interviewed by Abby Tabor from My Science Work about the how the idea came about, how we developed the open access button prototype and what are the plans for the future. You can read the interview over on the website here.
A screenshot of the map of denials of access from our prototype is the picture of the week in this week’s BMJ. You can check it out in print or at the link to the pdf here.
Last weekend’s BMJ Hack has been reported in the BMJ. The article can be found here.
Over the course of the BMJ Hack weekend, team member Joseph McArthur was interviewed by the BMJ’s Digital Engagement Editor, Matthew Billingsley. The interview can be found over here on the BMJ’s clinical community doc2doc or can be streamed below.
Last weekend, we took our open access button idea to the BMJ Hack and we built a protoype. We storify’d the weekend here. Who knew you could have so much fun? Indoors, on the hottest weekend of the year. Open Access Button@OA_Button Hello. Sat, Jul 06 2013 04:03:43 rewiredstate@rewiredstate Kicking off in a few minutes #BMJHack Sat, Jul 06 2013 02:17:34 David Carroll@davidecarroll The Open Access button, we need your help!
If we want to bring about a more open community we’ll need more tools, more information and more engagement around the issue. That’s where our idea comes in. Imagine a browser-based tool which allowed you to track every time someone was denied access to a paper? Better yet, imagine if that tool told gave you basic information about where in the world they were or their profession and why they were looking.