A couple of weeks ago, an article detailing new research findings by the Duke Canine Cognition Center appeared in our Raleigh area newspaper, the News and Observer. The researchers found that tone of voice can affect how different types of dogs—calmer dogs versus more energetic dogs—respond to their owners’ commands. As a dog owner myself, this is a potentially useful discovery that could help me and many others develop better relationships with our pets.

For those readers who wanted to delve deeper into the researchers’ methods and results by reading the original article, the News and Observer thoughtfully included a link to the article from the journal in which it was published: Animal Cognition. However, clicking on the link takes the reader not to the article itself but to an intermediary page that requires a payment of $40 in order to access the article. In the parlance of scholarly communication, the reader is “hitting a paywall.” By charging prohibitively high fees to view single articles, journals create a barrier between readers without a subscription (read: most of the general public) and the research they want to access.

This problem is not a new one. The open access movement has been trying to address the paywall issue for the better part of two decades. In 2010, as a part of that effort, the Duke faculty adopted a university-wide open access policy to facilitate wider access to their research. The policy enables faculty members to archive copies of their research articles in our institutional repository, DukeSpace. Open self-archiving is accepted by most journals, and many of Duke’s faculty members have uploaded their work to the repository. Anything archived in DukeSpace is free and open to anyone with an internet connection.

For the past two years, to raise awareness about the availability of DukeSpace as resource for making faculty work available to the public, the Duke Libraries Office of Copyright and Scholarly Communication has been collaborating with our Office of News and Communication to provide open access copies of research papers that are featured in the news. When a news story is about to be released, we are alerted so that we can get in touch with the authors and request a copy of the research article. Most authors get back to us within a day or two. My colleagues and I then upload the article to the repository and provide the permanent link to Duke News to include in the story.

Since we began seeking these articles out, we’ve uploaded dozens of papers to the repository, many of which have seen very high numbers of downloads. One particular article about a new material that can harvest power from the airwaves has been viewed nearly 17,000 times since it was archived in DukeSpace in 2013. And the readership wasn’t limited to the United States. Many of the downloads came from other countries, including India, China, Russia, and Japan.

Like that article, we wanted to make the Canine Cognition Center’s paper available openly. Though the News and Observer is not a Duke publication, we still saw the opportunity to leverage our open access policy to provide wider access to the article. When the authors received my request, they were—like most of the authors we contact—more than happy to provide a copy of the article. They were quite appreciative, in fact, of the offer to upload it on their behalf, as it would help increase the impact of the article’s findings. It is now available for download free of charge in Dukespace.

I hope that this case will raise awareness among news agencies of the limited access the public has to academic research, but also of ability to collaborate with authors and institutions to provide open copies of research articles. By contacting the researchers and asking them to post an open access version of their paper, you will not be imposing on them, but helping them increase the reach and impact of their scholarship. And in so doing, you’ll be affording more readers the opportunity to engage with current research.

For all the dog lovers out there, enjoy the article.