Run and Tumble

We’re halfway through the halfway point of Open Access Week 2009. The basic idea of open access is that we all benefit if results from research are published online for free.  The site does a good job of explaining why this is so, and I leave it to people who deal with journals on a daily basis to defend the major points. I want to talk about why it matters to me, right now.

I love learning, I like to sink deep into a topic, read my fill, and end up with even more things I want to learn about. The more resources available, the happier I am.

For reasons that’ll be clear a few posts from now, I was interested in the antimicrobial properties of various essential oils. I was able to gather some understanding from a few of abstracts, but far too many were of the form ‘We tested A, B, and C.  Some showed moderate activity.’  No hint of which ones showed the vaguely defined ‘moderate’ activity.  And hey, maybe I want to read the methods section (either to see if it’s bullshit, or to find out how to try it at home).  Open access lets amateurs(in the old for the love of it sense of of the word) like myself learn, so I support it.

I mean, come on, OA lets anyone who can get to a computer learn all they want about how T. rex may have been brought down by an ancestor of a chicken parasite.