[Open-access] A sad encapsulation of why Open Access is so important

Fri Dec 21 13:56:22 UTC 2012

Ross,

Please immediately put this message, unchanged, in a blog post or on a
Google+ page or somewhere else that I can link to it. It deserves to
be more widely read than this email list.

-- Mike.

On 21 December 2012 13:36, Ross Mounce <ross.mounce at gmail.com> wrote:
> Dear All,
>
> I thought I'd share what is perhaps a new and interesting example of missed
> impact through Closed Access research publishing.
>
> I was reading this new Nature blog post 'What were the top papers of 2012 on
> social media?'
> http://blogs.nature.com/news/2012/12/what-were-the-top-papers-of-2012-on-social-media.html
>
> and found that the 3rd most tweeted paper (cumulatively) throughout 2012 was
> first published way back in 1996.
> Why was such an old paper so topical in 2012?
>
> Well, the title is: "Rape-related pregnancy: estimates and descriptive
> characteristics from a national sample of women"
>
> It is not a freely accessible paper. Most people can only see the abstract
> without paying more. The tweets are clearly related to this news story and
> related US political issues:
> http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/aug/19/republican-todd-akin-rape-pregnancy
>
> Perhaps Todd Akin and other public policy-makers in the US and abroad might
> have benefited from Open Access to this and related research?
>
>
> Am I clutching at straws here with my thinking that this is huge missed
> potential for societal impact? The difference between an abstract and the
> fulltext is immense - what knowledge benefits have we missed out on here
> with so many citizens and policymakers denied full access to this
> publicly-funded* piece of medical research?
>
>
> Food for thought perhaps?
>
>
>
> Ross
>
>
>
>
> * The paper was "Supported by National Institute on Drug Abuse Grant No.
> ROIDA05220"
>
>
> --
> -/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-
> Ross Mounce
> PhD Student & Open Knowledge Foundation Panton Fellow
> Fossils, Phylogeny and Macroevolution Research Group
> University of Bath, 4 South Building, Lab 1.07
> http://about.me/rossmounce
> -/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-
>
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