Public Access Payment Machine
A project by Hélène Trommelen, Stijn van Linden and Matthijs Theelen.
With the invention of the web a whole new world was opened for mankind. A new platform where ideas and inventions could be spread freely. In 1995, Forbes, the business magazine, made a prediction: Elsevier, the largest publisher of scientific journals, would be “the internet’s first victim”. The prediction was that Elsevier would lose subscribers to their journals as scientists could now share their discoveries on the internet for free.Unfortunately for science and mankind, this did not happen. Instead, the digital sharing of information was constrained by structures rooted in the old world. Thus, taking away much of its potential for creating an open space for sharing information. Taking our inspiration from the widely discussed PACER system. We want to draw attention to the ridiculousness of the constraints that are put upon accessing the world’s scientific and cultural heritage.
This project was established to embody the characteristics of the current system, and to make people aware that it is very outdated. The double cost model of having to pay scientists to do their work, and then to have to pay publishers to view that scientists work is just ridiculous.
Therefore, have created an “Article Slot Machine” where the user pays ten cents and the first page of the Article appears. To view the next page of the article, the viewer has to pay another ten cents. However, the user is not able go back through the pages. The viewer has to pay indefinitely to scroll through the article (but only forward). We wanted this article to be about open access and what it could mean for the scientific world, just to add a bit of irony. The article we chose is called “Open Access: Unlocking the Value of Scientific Research”. The pun is clear, the users literally unlocks this scientific research to read an article about free access. Next to the article there will be lines of text that taunt the reader into thinking about what he just did. Lines like “thanks for supporting my new car... err... Elsevier!” are meant to clearly get across the message we want to send. That the fee that we are paying journals is outrageous and unnecessary.
References:
Richard K. Johnson (2005) Open Access, Journal of Library Administration, 42:2, 107-124. Link: http://eprints.rclis.org/6913/1/OA-Oklahoma_article.pdf
PACER in the media