I don’t know how many of you heard the news out of Princeton last week. And no, I’m not talking about its US News ranking (although go Tigers). I’m talking about the news that the university will ask its scientists to publish only in open access journals. The impetus was apparently to make sure faculty can send around copies of papers they publish without fear of running afoul of a publisher’s copyright.

The event is the latest in a trend toward open access that began in earnest several years ago, when the U.S. government mandated that all research paid for by taxpayer dollars—-through grants from the National Institutes of Health, for example—-be available to those taxpayers free of charge. A compromise was struck with publishers, whose business models largely depend on charging for data, whereby papers would still cost money to access for a certain period immediately after publication before being deposited in a free government-run repository thereafter. Prominent universities like Yale and Harvard have also undertaken open-access policies. As a result, some traditionally subscription-only publishers now allow authors to designate that papers be open-access from the outset, for a fee.

As you can imagine, we follow these things rather closely at Pubget, because they have a direct impact on how we get you papers. Pubget is already the fastest way to get you PDFs that are open access (we help you get your subscription PDFs faster, too, if you’re at one of our 400+ institutions). But knowing when a paper’s become open access takes a bit of work—-and not just for us, but for publishers themselves: because traditionally papers have either been subscription or open access from the start, a world in which different papers in the same journal could potentially be either taxes traditional infrastructure that was built from a journal’s eye view, if you will.

At Pubget, we look at things the way you do: paper by paper. We’ve been working directly with publishers to help them realize our common mission: of letting you get the information you need to do amazing things. But meanwhile, what the news out of Princeton really got me thinking was how much I want to thank all of you out there who have been writing us whenever they find open-access papers that have fallen through the cracks. So, thank you for helping us help you do science at speed.

I heard the coolest thing the other day, so cool I had to sit down. 

Terry Gross was interviewing Charles Mann on NPR’s Fresh Air. Mann has just written a book called “1493” about the ecological aftermath of Columbus’ discovery. I’d learned a little about this in school: how Europeans introduced horses, how tomatoes come from the Americas. But I’d never heard that before Columbus, northern North America had no earthworms. They’d been wiped out there by the last Ice Age, says Mann. And so the leaves that fall here in New England would pile up into mats that trees would grow straight out of. Today earthworms turn those leaves into soil. If you spent any time in the woods as a kid, the thought of no earthworms and the ground under your feet having been totally different might have the same effect on you as it did on me. 

The story goes that the worms came in soil in the ballast of ships sent to bring tobacco back from Virginia to Europe (tobacco being another American original). In the centuries since, says Mann, a “worm front” has been spreading out from the eastern seaboard. Today it has reached as far as Minnesota, where the Minnesota Worm Watch is deputizing the locals to try to save the native forest. Needless to say I want to read this book. Very cool. 

The story got me thinking: what makes something cool? What is it about a book or story or research paper that makes you stop and say “wow” and want to tell people about it? And being practical, can one define a set of metrics or attributes that we can use to keep ourselves in a steady supply of cool? 

To be cool something has to be interesting, of course, but also new and unexpected. Connecting otherwise unrelated things—-electrodes and cooking hot dogs; the Santa Maria and a 5,000-mile inexorable front of earthworms—-seems also to be important. Mixing scales of measure—-the very big and very small, or the very quick and very slow—-also helps. But are all new, unexpected connections between unrelated things at different scales of measure cool? Do these things explain what makes this paper cool? 

What makes a paper cool to you?