Student breaks barriers
JACK Andraka is a perfect example of the power of Open Access, the free availability of all academic research articles online with full reuse rights.
When he was only 16, Andraka discovered a breakthrough pancreatic cancer diagnostic using carbon nanotubes. His test cost $0.03 and took five minutes to run with nearly 100 percent accuracy, making it 26 667 times cheaper, 168 times faster, and 400 times more sensitive than the test commonly used.
Andraka went on to win the 2012 Intel International Science and Engineering Fair. His story would not be possible without Open Access.
“I hit a lot of paywalls, like you have to pay $40 (R500) per article, and I couldn’t shell out a lot of that,” he said. “So I would have to cheat and copy the article title back into Google and look for PDF versions, and a lot of the time I actually found them on the NIH PubMed site.”
Andraka has previously said he used free online academic journals “religiously” and the American National Institute of Health’s PubMed Central, an online database of articles in the biomedical sciences that has become an invaluable resource to students, researchers and practitioners.
“PubMed Central gets 830 000 hits and about 1.6 million articles downloaded daily,” said Francis S Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health. “We have a policy that papers from NIH-funded researchers must be made available through PubMed Central within 12 months of publication. The goal is that all scientific papers are open access… it’s making such a difference.”
In February 2013, the Obama Administration made Open Access “a priority at the highest level”, said Collins, by issuing an executive directive expanding the NIH policy to require all federal science agencies to make the articles resulting from the research they fund freely available online within 12 months of publication in a journal.
We need more Jack Andrakas, and Open Access empowers anyone to explore their scientific curiosity freely and make breakthroughs. As Collins mentions: “(For) anybody who cares about science, the idea of having Open Access is going to be crucial for the future.” – The Right to Research Coalition, with support from the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition and the Society for Science and the Public. See www.righttoresearch.org