How does Joe Public read the scientific literature?

Factual Questions
1

He doesn’t, bro! [have to head that response off :)].

I’ve been thinking about the open access question a bit lately, and wondering what is the present state of access to the literature is for the general public. Specifically, can the general public use University libraries in your locale?

I was somewhat surprised to see that my local University, Manchester UK, does in fact let the public have 3 visits to the library for free, after which a £30 annual fee is required. A key restriction, though, is that access to online journals is very limited. It doesn’t appear that one can have some sort of guest account in this respect. Given the overwhelming push away from paper journals, this is quite an important limitation.

2

My old boss said all Ivy League schools have, in their charters, a clause that says their libraries are free to all members of the state or commonwealth. FWIW, I would often go to Yale’s library, and no one checked my ID. But there was a hidden sign that said “College Members Only”, so I’ve staid away lately.

Many journals allow electronic access. They may allow you to download the entire PDF, or just the abstract, for free. If you just type some search items into Goggle, you’ll find these pages.

What I’m wondering is if public libraries happen to subscribe to any of the major online journals or if I could just wardrive on the grounds of the local university.

3

My alma mater’s library is a Federal Depository library, and I believe that the idea is that it receives copies of Federal documents for the purpose of making them available to the general public.

I did visit the library of Virginia Tech a number of years ago and asked about checking out books, and I believe that they told me that one didn’t need to have ANY affiliation with the university in order to check out books (though there may have been a tighter restriction on number of books that could be checked out or how long they could be checked out for). If Joe Random can check out books, I highly doubt they would mind general perusing of journals on the shelf. This is anecdotal and it may have changed since.

In terms of wardriving, my alma mater restricts wireless LAN access, and you need university credentials to login. I haven’t tried my old credentials, but I would shy away from that anyway, even if they would technically work, because I like to be on good terms with them and don’t want trouble the next time I visit.

4

Not for Harvard at least, which has one of the largest collections in the country

Lib.Harvard.edu/Catalogs/finding_materials.HTML

“borrowing policies … are generally limited to current members of the Harvard community with a Harvard ID …”

5

Unless you’re going into the rare books collection, no one checks for ID here at Cornell. To check out a book, you’ll need a valid university ID or library card. However, you’re free to peruse the books in the library itself. (Or I should say, in each library building, since there’s more than one.)

Computer terminal use is free, as is WiFi access. If you don’t have a university account, you do have to register for guest WiFi access, said registration being limited to giving and confirming your email address; guest access is also limited to 21 days per year. As long as you have an IP address that resolves to the university subnet (including the WiFi accounts) you gain access to the library’s entire catalog of electronic subscriptions, including PDFs of entire articles.

6

One strategy might be to register for a course at the local university, or even the local community college. That will get you a Student ID for the semester and you should then have unrestricted access to the library.

This advice used to be given years ago with respect to Internet access.

7

My alma mater never checked for ID to enter or browse the library, but I did visit “the” GWU in Washington, DC to look up some materials that my school didn’t have. They checked ID, but there was mutual recognition of the schools and my non-GWU ID was good enough. They probably check ID because it is an urban area and they don’t want homeless people living in the stacks and in study carrels.

8

Much of the literature is also available through other channels than the publishers themselves. Almost everything in physics nowadays, for instance, ends up on the Arxiv, generally a short time before it hits the journals themselves (in fact, I think that releasing the paper on the Arxiv might even be a condition of federal funding for research, though I’m not sure on that). And everyone has access to everything on the Arxiv, with no registration or affiliation needed.

9

Journal copyright restrictions are routinely ignored by working computer scientists, or they have pushed for some exemption to the standard copyright agreement. I can’t tell which it is. I know it’s routine to put all of your publications in “preprint form” (but this is a polite fiction) PDF and Postscript files on your website. Certainly nobody has bothered me about it. In fact, it drives me absolutely daft when an author doesn’t have a PDF version of their work on their website (usually older authors).

10

Staff ID, even with a part-time job, gets you full access, so you could get hired to a campus position.

In any event, I don’t think getting a library card is too hard to get here. As the land grant institution of New York (we’re the aggies of the Ivy League), part of Cornell’s mandate is to serve the greater needs of the state, which includes library usage.

There’s also PLoS, which publishes several peer-reviewed journals for free electronically.

11

All the US university libraries I am familiar with will let anyone look at paper journals, but a lot of them no longer subscribe to the paper version of many of their journals any more (even if it still exists), and they will not let use their online subscriptions without student or faculty ID. UK universities used to be similar, but they seem to have got more restrictive even about what is on the shelves lately.

Many public libraries will carry Nature and/or Science, but rarely other scientific journals, and sometimes they do not keep the back issues very long.

However, open access journals, that anyone can access online, are becoming more and more plentiful and important. Here is the Directory of open access journals. There are hundreds. A lot of them are crappy, but some (notably some of the Plos journals) have already become quite prestigious. Some of the well established paper journals have opened up their archives to free online access too (this seems to be particularly prevalent in physiology, for some reason). You would have to pay through the nose for their latest publications, but if it is a few years old you may not have to.

Also, if there is a particular article that you want, try searching for it by its title on Google Scholar. Quite often this will turn up copies (sometimes “penultimate drafts,” but even those are often vanishingly different in content from the published version) that the author, or even someone else, has archived on their own or some other web site, or in an institutional archive…

12

Every school I’ve attended or worked at has been the same way. It’s rare to actually have to handle a print copy of a journal; not having online access is actually a huge annoyance. However, I worry about this; what if I end up at a job that doesn’t give me unfettered journal access? If there *are *any open-source chemistry journals out there, they’re crap. Not having access to at least JACS, ACIE, and the relevant topical journals would have me rapidly falling out of date. I’m pretty sure the last two schools didn’t even give journal access to continuing ed students; you had to be in a degree program. I doubt many CCs have full journal access.

13

I would suspect that, since many journals come with a hefty price tag, there are licensing agreements in place for some of them indicating that the online versions are for the sole use of University-affiliated folks. That enables the publishers to provide volume pricing with less likelihood that some stimulating-to-the-public article on “Quantum Cryptography in Small Insects and Dust Bunnies” would end up getting widely distributed without them getting their due publication fees.

Also, particularly with some science journals, there could be export controls or just information that isn’t desired to be generally available. I once worked with [unnamed publisher]; some of the information their contributors came up with was actually classified (or classification was imminent). Naturally, they couldn’t publish it, but it always seemed to me that there would be a chance of something slipping through. At least with access restricted to a known reader population damage control and/or audibility are in place.

14

I have wondered into the library at our nearest state school and browsed through the JAVMA. I didn’t happen to find much I was interested in, and what I found was tough going. On line I keep running into http://www.avma.org/noah/members/memlog.asp

When it comes to dogs, there is a ton of junk science available for free on the net, but almost nothing of the real journals. njtt made some interesting suggestions I may follow up on.

15

The universities here allow anybody to use their resources in person - if you need a journal that’s only electronic they’ll get you on a computer. Of course, many university libraries in the US are government repositories, which must be open to the public.

16

Oh, yes, there’s also PubMed Central (PMC), which archives full biomedical and life science articles for free access. PMC came about due to a mandate from the National Institutes of Health that all papers resulting from research funded by them must be made available to the public for free. Other government funding agencies may have similar policies and you’ll often the resulting papers in PMC or ArXiv, as already mentioned by Chronos.

17

This seems to be the standard practice for younger researchers in most of the disciplines I’m familiar with.

18

I see this occasionally with chemists, but usually they just have DOI links. Pisses me right off when they don’t have either. I prefer the DOI actually, since the journal page often has a link to download into my citation manager, and for some journals I prefer to read the HTML versions of articles.

19

So how far down the line of open access journals are physics and CS? If (nearly) everything is on Arxiv in any case, this must act as a huge stick to keep the publishers in line with their pricing.

20

All scientific libraries in Bavaria = all University libraries plus the state library - are open to the general interested scientific public, provided that they are over 18 years old. They can get a user card for free, provided that they have a primary residence in Germany. If they have no primary residence, they can get a user’s card for the reading room only. Some books may be restricted for use in the reading room only (cooking books, fiction, children’s books) because the state library archives those and wants their users to use them for scientific reasons, not trivial or private reason (so buy your cooking books in a bookstore or go to a normal public library, unless you’re writing a study about the change in cooking books over the centuries).

That’s all for books and printed journals.

E-journals are different, because each university has a different treaty. There was an attempt at concerted action because of the high prices, where each bavarian university would pick different journals and all together, they covered all journals.

If you belong to a university, either as student or employee, and need an article from an e-journal that another uni has (and there’s no paper print of said journal available alternativly) then you do interlibrary loan for a print/ copy.

If you are a private, interested, person, you go to the state library and follow the same route.

Outside Bavaria, inside Germany, all publications are collected at the Die Deutsche Bibliothek (Frankfurt and Leipzig) the German national library, similar to the Library of Congress or the British Library. Access to the reading rooms there is allowed for every interested person, who can read or make copies, but because they act as archive, no borrowing is allowed. Again, no cost for use, only for copies as usual.

University libraries may restrict borrowing of faculty libraries to their own students or generally, making it a reading room so that students have always access to the books. Universities may also restrict the lending of textbooks to their own students because of the huge cost and demand for those.

Libraries may restrict the lending time for electronic media, to increase circulation, or, as with e-journals and books, to give greater access to more people. E-Textbooks may be available by chapters for a week. Scanned text books may only be available at selected computers in the reading room to protect copyright. Technical restrictions on the PDF files make saving files or printing impossible. Adobe has a special tool that monitors the allowed time of lending and automatically deletes the local file when the time is up so that other users can read it.

For modern e-books, digital textbooks and e-journals, hard contracts are fought over the high price and conditions of access, leading to some of the above restrictions.

With older books where copyright has run out, google scans them with a robot and puts them online in return for broadening their amount on Google books.