Open Access

I love what I learn when I read.

Access to research findings that would help me as a clinician and my clients disappeared after I graduated.  I could not get access to free articles to save my life.  I spoke to the librarian of my alma mater about access.  I spoke to the director of the school of social work at a public university where I taught.  No one could get me free access to journal articles.  And yet, we were expected to keep up with the research and use it to inform our practice.

After the revolution of Napster, there is one now in process for technological access to research articles.  It is about time.  I hope that it helps to lay down a step on the bridge between research and practice.  

An excerpt from the Budapest Open Access Initative, a movement started in 2002:

"An old tradition and a new technology have converged to make possible an unprecedented public good.  The old tradition is the willingness of scientists and scholars to publish the fruits of their research in scholarly journals without payment, for the sake of inquiry and knowledge.  The new technology is the internet.  The public good they make possible is the world-wide electronic distribution of the peer-reviewed journal literature and completely free and unrestricted access to it by all scientists, scholars, teachers, students, and other curious minds.  Removing access barriers to this literature will accelerate research, enrich education, share the learning of the rich with the poor and the poor with the rich, make this literature as useful as it can be, and lay the foundation for uniting humanity in a common intellectual conversation and quest for knowledge."
(www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml)
In UCLA Graduate Quarterly, Spring 2011

It sounds like the veil is being lifted between the sacred and profane.