Very early this year, I wrote a very sad article about the passing of Aaron Swartz and the battle he forged against censorship on the Internet. Aaron faced charges under the decades old Computer Fraud and Abuse Act for downloading large amounts of academic research articles from the JSTOR database at MIT in his quest to promote free access to taxpayer funded research.
So when I came across this video of Dr Francis Collins, Director of National Institutes of Health interviewing 16 year old Jack Andraka, a sophomore at North County High School, MD, the winner of the 2012 Intel International Science and Engineering Fair about his invention of a new way to detect pancreatic, ovarian and lung cancer and the incredible lengths Jack went to in researching and educating himself to get to the point of being able to achieve his goal, my mind flicked back to Aaron Swartz, a trailblazer in pursuit of Open Access.
Explaining the process adopted, Jack described how he would type keywords into Google, locate publications and read through their bibliographies to locate further research studies. He then spoke of the frustration he faced when he would hit numerous paywalls which cost $40 per article to access. Not having the finance to pursue this path, Jack said he would instead ‘cheat’ by copying the article title back into Google looking for pdf versions of the article. These, he said, he often found on the NIH PubMed site. Lamenting that not all articles he wanted to read were available on PubMed, Jack said it would be so much better if people could just go to Google or Wikipedia to access articles. Unheeded by paywalls, Jack said, could result in great innovations.
Responding to Jack’s comments, the Director of National Institutes of Health, Dr Francis Collins, explained how NIH was leading by example. Anyone funded by NIH who publishes an article is obliged to make that article available within 12 months to Open Access on PubMed. With 830,000 people accessing PubMed daily and the download of 1.6 million articles – whole articles, not abstracts – Francis agrees with this young researcher on the significant value of Open Access.
In closing, Jack defines Open Access as opening the playing field from a few hundred thousand people to millions and millions of people across the world.
Powerful stuff.
Have a listen to the interview:
Watching Jack receive the INTEL ISEF 2012 Gordon E Moore Award is exhilarating.
And finally watching Jack’s TED Talk in June 2012 speaks volumes of where this young man is headed!
Update: An ever so slightly older Jack speaking at TED in February 2013. Very nice!
I really enjoyed this post Bev. An amazing young man whose research would not have been possible, at his age, before the Internet era. Open access for research is so important for innovation and medical progress. On another note, thanks for all your interesting posts. I always look forward to reading them!
Thanks so much for your lovely comment Jennifer. It’s so nice to know that my words are of interest to others!
Yes – Open Access is a hot topic. Many don’t agree that “Open Access” is the way to go. If my understanding is correct, they say that funding given by big corporations to research needs to be recovered somehow. Payment for
access to published research is just one of the ways these corporations can get their money back.
What do others think?