Read paywalled research papers for free — huge win for Open Access movement

By Brian Santo, contributing writer

In a coincidence, the availability of research blew up into two separate public arguments. China demanded that a major university press censor several hundred papers, and worry is growing that President Donald Trump will refuse to release a major new report on climate science. 

Just about everybody who has ever done research has been frustrated at least once bumping up against paywalls demanding some coin before access is granted. Only a bit over one-fourth (28%) of all papers written since 1900 can be accessed for free, but the trend is reversing. A little less than half (45%) of all papers published since 2015 are freely available, according to a new estimate by ImpactStory. 

And that percentage is likely to grow. In 2016, the European Commission (the policy arm of the European Union, or EU) proposed that all publicly financed research would be available for free by 2020.

Research papers in and of themselves do not represent a means to generate profit for their authors or the institutions they represent. When paywalls exist, it’s usually to benefit publishers, who incur expenses curating and publishing research papers. For this reason and others, the European Commission’s goal is perhaps too ambitious, but the EC understands that and it remains intent on trying.

It seems intuitively that there is value in free access to research papers, but until recently, that was little more than a guess. Fortunately, there’s a growing body of research on the growing body of research. The usefulness of research can be measured by how often it is cited. A pair of researchers associated with Duke University in 2013 determined that free research is cited more often (by 9%) than research that must be paid for.

In their paper, “Data reuse and the open data citation advantage,” they also determined that data made available in free research can be reused for years; this is especially so in the field of genetics. The paper is available for free here .

One of those Duke researchers, Heather Piwowar, is co-founder of the nonprofit ImpactStory, which advocates for open research; the term coming into common use is “open access,” or OA. Unpaywall , an organization tightly associated with ImpactStory, recently released an app called Unpaywall that helps identify OA research (the app is available for Chrome and Firefox).

While the OA trend appears to be accelerating, it seems to be accelerating largely in open societies. Not everyone believes that all information should be accessible. Last week, China demanded the Cambridge University Press remove 315 articles from the online site of the China Quarterly. These scholarly articles and research papers dealt with a number of subjects that the Chinese government finds sensitive, including the former country of Tibet, the 1989 massacre in Tianenman Square, and Mao’s Cultural Revolution.

Without consulting China Quarterly, Cambridge University Press complied. The move met with growing condemnation from academics and activists around the world. On Monday, the Cambridge Press reversed itself .

That the censorship came from China over articles about politics cannot be easily dismissed as a separate issue — not when OA is becoming an issue in general, and not when science has become politicized, especially in the United States. For example, scientists working for 13 federal agencies have written a Congressionally mandated report on climate change that the President seems to be trying to “ignore to death .”