Our most recent manuscript was almost ready for submission. We were planning to send it to an open access journal. It was then that I had the thought: how many papers in the reference list are freely available?
It somehow didn’t make much sense to point readers towards papers that they might not be able to access. So, I wondered if there was a quick way to determine how papers in my reference list were open access. I asked on twitter and got a number of suggestions:
- Search crossref to find out if the journal is in DOAJ (@epentz)
- How Open Is It? from Cottage Labs will check a list of DOIs (up to 20) for openness (@emanuil_tolev)
- Open access DOI Resolver will perform a similar task (@neurocraig)
I actually used a fourth method (from @biochemistries and @invisiblecomma) which was to use HubMed, although in the end a similar solution can be reached by searching PubMed itself. Whereas the other strategies will work for a range of academic texts, everything in my reference list was from PubMed. So this solution worked well for me. I pulled out the list of Accessions (PMIDs) for my reference list. This was because some papers were old and I did not have their DOIs. The quickest way to do this was to make a new EndNote style that only contained the field Accession and get it to generate a new bibliography from my manuscript. I appended [uid] OR after each one and searched with that term.
What happened?
My paper had 44 references. Of these, 35 were freely available to read. I was actually surprised by how many were available. So, 9 papers were not free to read. As advised, I checked each one to really make sure that the HubMed result was accurate, and it was.
Please note that I’d written the paper without giving this a thought and citing papers as I normally do: the best demonstration of something, the first paper to show something, using primary papers as far as possible.
Seven of the nine I couldn’t compromise on. They’re classic papers from 80s and 90s that are still paywalled but are unique in what they describe. However, two papers were reviews in closed access journals. Now these I could do something about! Especially as I prefer to cite the primary literature anyway. Plus, most reviews are pretty unoriginal in what they cover and an alternative open access version that is fairly recent can easily be found. I’ll probably run this check for future manuscripts and see what it throws up.
Summary
It’s often said that papers are our currency in science. The valuation of this currency comes from citations. Funnily enough, we the authors are in a position to actually do something about this. I don’t think any of us should compromise the science in our manuscripts. However, I think we could all probably pay a bit more attention to the citations that we dish out when writing a paper. Whether this is simply to make sure that what we cite is widely accessible, or just making sure that credit goes to the right people.
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The post title is taken from “To Open Closed Doors” by D.R.I. from the Dirty Rotten LP