Playing Ball With Publishers

Towards the end of October, I was alerted to a particular article of interest published in the subscription based magazine, Scientific American (Sci Am). I was unable to freely access it.

I contacted the leading author (*) to see if they would consider self archiving a copy in an Institutional Repository.

It transpired that Professor Aebischer (*) "has been President of the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale of Lausanne (EPFL)in Switzerland for the past seven years".

The Swiss are OA compliant !!

A rather helpful Librarian at EPFL (David Aymonin) after a few weeks, managed to obtain express permission from Sci Am to archive a version of the article. This was done yesterday and I was provided with a note of the relevant url by David.

I have now been able to make a large (and growing) number of people potentially interested in reading the article aware of how to freely access it.

"Playing Defense Against Lou Gehrig's Disease" can now be accessed via two methods:-

Open Access

and

Toll Access

--

The message here is that I would encourage people generally to where there is no mandate in place to do so, encourage individuals to archive their work regardless if it is published via the TA or OA model.

McDawg