A discussão sobre revistas de acesso aberto (open access) x revistas de acesso fechado (as disponíveis somente para quem faz assinatura de conteúdo) está em voga. Neste blog, temos apresentado alguns argumentos a favor do acesso aberto. Esses argumentos, no entanto, vem sendo apresentados por pesquisadores, em sua maioria. No entanto, ontem me deparei com este post, publicado no The student blog (PLOS Blogs). No post, Jack Andraka, aluno de high school, explica porque, na opinião dele, a divulgação científica (os artigos publicados) devem ser de livre acesso, para todos e não só para quem está na universidade. Veja a história:
After a close family friend died from pancreatic cancer, I turned to the
Internet to help me understand more about this disease that had killed him so
quickly. I was 14 and didn’t even know I had a pancreas but I soon educated
myself about what it was and started learning about how it was diagnosed. I was
shocked to discover that the current way of detecting pancreatic cancer was
older than my dad and wasn’t very sensitive or accurate. I figured there had to
be a better way!
I soon learned that many of the papers I was
interested in reading were hidden behind expensive pay walls. I convinced my mom
to use her credit card for a few but was discouraged when some of them turned
out to be expensive but not useful to me. She became much less willing to pay
when she found some in the recycle bin! One of the best journal articles was
called Carbon Nanotubes: the route towards applications.
This was the [paywall to the] article I
smuggled into biology class the day my teacher was explaining antibodies and how
they worked. I was not able to access very many more articles directly. I was 14
and didn’t drive and it seemed impossible to go to a University and request
access to journals.
Some adults have told me I should have done
that but, as a 14 year old, it was intimidating. It was also hard to get my
parents to drive me to a University library since they didn’t really believe in
my project and were trying to convince me to change projects! So there are a lot
of barriers for kids to learn more and educate themselves. Open access would
help people like me who may not drive or have access to a University
library.
Luckily I was able to convince my mom to
finance some more articles I needed and I learned to try different ways of
circumventing the pay walls. I emailed one author with some questions though and
he was able to provide me with a copy. Writing authors directly is a good way to
get articles without paying but I didn’t figure this out right away.
I was persistent enough to be able to get
access or at least the abstracts to enough journals to help me write my proposal
which I then used the Internet to find and email over 200 local professors who
were working on pancreatic cancer. Of course, most didn’t take me seriously or
were too busy or just not interested in helping but I finally did get into a
lab. Of course when I did get into a lab, then the University had access to so
many articles because they subscribed to them. However, even universities are feeling that
the subscriptions are expensive.
I was on a panel with Luis A. Ubiñas , head of
the Ford Foundation, and heard him describe how running times at the Olympics
plummeted after African countries started participating. I was thinking that if
kids around the world could get connected to the internet and journals and each
other, that even more creativity would be harnessed to solve the world’s
problems.
Open access would be an important first
step. I would love to see
research that is publicly funded by taxes to be publicly available through
neighborhood libraries and public school libraries.
It would make it so
much easier for people like me to find the information they need. If I can create a sensor to detect cancer using
the Internet, imagine what you can do.
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