Protests Demonstrate Growing Demand for Open Access to Research

Last week, Winston Hide committed what he called "a toxic career move." Hide, an associate professor of bioinformatics and computational biology at the Harvard School of Public Health, publicly resigned from the editorial board of Genomics, an influential journal in his field. "No longer can I work for a system that provides solid profits for the publisher while effectively denying colleagues in developing countries access to research findings," he wrote in a piece for the Guardian. "I cannot stand by any longer while access to scientific resources is restricted."

Hide's denunciation of Geonomics' publisher, Elsevier, joins a growing chorus of discontent with academic presses' restrictive access policies, which professors like Hide claim prevent important research from having the impact it could. Hide, for instance, notes that colleagues in South Africa can't access critical biomedical journals because their libraries simply cannot afford subscriptions to them. And individual subscriptions to journals and academic databases are expensive, too—so expensive that authors will often resort to swapping copyrighted material among networks of trusted colleagues instead of purchasing their own copies from publishers' websites...