Making the results of publicly-funded research freely available to everyone

Hi everyone

As you may have seen, we recently published a short blog about how research is published and the movement towards making research fully and freely available to everyone.

You can read the blog here:

http://talkparkinsons.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/opening-up-european-research.html

Most research is funded either by the taxpayer or charities like Parkinson's UK.

But more often than not, the results of the research are published behind paywalls - and unless you pay the publisher a large sum - you won't be able to access them...

This system means that, most of the time, the people who pay for the research (the public) cannot see the results.

We think this is wrong, and we're working with other funders to change things.

We're going to be speaking to Parkinson's researchers about this issue at our research conference in November - and we'd really like to be able to share your thoughts with them.

So if you could send a message to researchers about this what would you say? Do you have a right to the results of their research? What difference would it make to you?

We'd love to hear from you - so please post your comments here on the forum or add a comment to the blog.

Many thanks!

Claire

(Research team)