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I followed a tweet to a blog post about a paper that caught my eye this morning...

Student attitudes to academic use of social networks
http://lebioscience.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/student-attitudes-to-academic-use-of.html

The blog post has a link to the 'open access version' of the paper - https://lra.le.ac.uk/handle/2381/27783

Great I thought... just what I need, I thought.

The link goes to one of those dreadful repository jump-off pages - all metadata and no action.

All the obvious links on the page go to the publisher's website - http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17439884.2013.777077 and thence to http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/17439884.2013.777077.

£23.50 a shot to read the paper - hey, I'm interested... but not that interested!

So, back to the jump-off page. There must be an open access version somewhere - after all, I followed a link marked open access.

Ah, there it is... small print, right at the bottom. (It's the only thing I'm really interested in, so why is it right at the bottom?).

LRA.pdf - not exactly the most obvious link text?

I followed the link to https://lra.le.ac.uk/bitstream/2381/27783/2/LRA.pdf

Oh, another blockage... "Choose a Login Method".

I followed the link marked "New, non-University of Leicester user? Click here to register."

OK... I go thru a very confusing registration process...

At the end of which...

Still no access - "You do not have permission to perform the action you just attempted."

Back to the jump-off page.

Ah, deep in the metadata is the text "Embargo on File Until: 2014-03-08"

Does that mean I can't get access for a whole year? :-(

I gave up.

I appreciate that this is a sample of one - but it is my only recent sample so I have to draw my own conclusions from it. If this is the brave new world of open access, I think we've failed.

Yours,

Disappointed of Bath

Andy Powell
Head of Product Research

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