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As you likely already know, authors are not paid to publish in peer-reviewed journals, nor are they paid to perform peer review itself. Furthermore, the majority of research is publicly funded in the first place. Despite all of this, the results of the latest scientific and medical research are often locked within expensive, subscription-based journals. These subscriptions can run from hundreds of dollars to tens of thousands. In fact, subscriptions are so expensive that not even the wealthiest institutions can afford to subscribe to all the journals, that their students, and faculty need. Happily, there is a better way. Open Access is the free, immediate, online availability of scientific and scholarly research articles with full reuse rights. Open Access not only means that an article is free to read but also published under an open license that allows anyone to distribute, translate, adapt, and perform computational analysis on the work. Authors can make their articles open in one of two ways: they can publish in open-access journals that make all content freely available online immediate
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ly upon publication, or they can post a manuscript of their article to an online repository, such as PubMed Central, where it can be accessed for free even if the final version is locked behind a paywall.
IFMSA and many IFMSA NMOs have been leading the charge for Open Access
In 2012, MSAKE-Kenya educated nearly half of all Kenyan medical students about Open Access and its importance. This NMO also helped pass an institutional Open Access policy at the University of Nairobi, which requires that all articles published by its faculty be made freely available online through the university’s online repository. In the United Kingdom, Medsin students started the Open Access Button project to track each time someone encounters a paywall and to help people find freely accessible copies of paywalled articles. In the United States of America, AMSA played a significant role in convincing the White House to issue an Executive Directive requiring articles resulting from publicly funded research be made freely available online within 12 months of publication. These NMOs are just a few examples. To get involved, you can reach out to these NMOs for guidance, participate in SCORE discussions of wider IFMSA involvement in Open Access, or contact the Right to Research Coalition directly. IFMSA students are beginning to have a real impact in making the results of research more openly available and with your support and the support of more NMOs, what IFMSA could accomplish on this issue in 2014 is truly exciting!
Get the Button! Juan López-Tavera
NMO: IFMSA-Mexico Autonomous University of Guadalajara, Mexico We are all familiar with the situation of being unable to access research articles. This is a common problem due to the current academic publishing system, where expensive journal subscription costs are becoming unaffordable for most universities [1] . This problem affects everyone: scientists, doctors, patients and students, but thanks to the work of students you can help end this problem, join the fight, and get your button at openaccessbutton.org The real cost of paywalled journals is not the subscription fee, but the lost opportunities for research and innovation leading to education improvement and a positive impact on human lives. Open Access publishing makes research outputs freely available to everyone, everywhere. It increases research impact and makes studies easier to replicate studies. In other words, open science is good science [2]. Even though the number of biomedical open access publications had increased to roughly 50% by 2010 [3], there is still a long way to go. www.ifmsa.org
jc.lopeztavera@gmail.com
The negative impact of paywalls is presumed to be great, but there has not been data supporting this. Until now! While studying, David Carroll and Joseph McArthur became aware of the problem of the traditional academic publishing system and wanted to do something about it. Their feelings of frustration and disappointment from hitting paywalls fueled their imagination, and they came up with a innovative idea to make visible the negative impact of paywalls. They conceived the idea of the Open Access Button. They recruited a group of web developers and Open Access advocates to develop a browser based tool to be clicked whenever someone hits a paywall. After several weeks of hard work and barely attending to their respective courses, David and Joseph launched the beta version of the product at the Berlin 11 Open Access Student Satellite Meeting, on 18th November 2013.