How does Joe Public read the scientific literature?

Factual Questions
21

I’m an academic librarian in the US, working at a state university. In our case, visitors can use the library. During visitor hours, they have browsable access to our print journals, both the current and the older ones in the stacks.

Online journals are a different matter. MOST of our online databases are available through our visitor terminals - these are available to visitors for 1 hour per day. When we cannot make a database available to a visitor, it’s because of licensing restrictions, not because we don’t want to. Beyond us, we’re lucky to have the GALILEO system that serves the state - this helps make some (though not to the levels that universities have) of the scholarly literature available statewide.

This aside, I would point out that your average non-scientist person looking for something in the scientific literature is not going to begin at most of the specific resources, like PubMed Central, listed here - and I’d say that’s understandable, since a good portion of them are not easy to search. They’re designed for people who know the language. And, to be fair, the scientific literature is not easy to read, generally. So, my assumption as to how most people in the general public find scientific literature:

[ul]
[li]Read an article in the secondary literature (Time, Newsweek, Scientific American, the NY Times, etc)[/li][li]Think “hey, I’d like to know more about the effects of wooden tables on people’s eating habits”[/li][li]Go to Google, search for wooden tables and eating habits[/li][li]Read some of the results that come up, which will typically be more secondary literature, companies trying to sell you wooden tables or the like[/li][/ul]

Some will want to go further and will seek out the original research article(s). Hopefully the initial article will give a citation or enough information that they can find that. Typically, they don’t - and most people (at least Americans) aren’t going to take that next step, for whatever reasons. If they do, they can try the sources above or they can get a copy of the article through interlibrary loan at their local public library.

The bottom line is that it’s not easy - though it shouldn’t be as difficult as it can be - and part of that, IMO, is that the systems in place don’t make it easy. We (we being the US) don’t do a good job of teaching the structure of the scientific literature to students as they go through school, so I’d suggest that many people don’t look for more literature - even when they’re interested - because they don’t know how to even begin looking beyond that Time article or the blip on the evening news.

Apologies for the threadjack - you’ve kind of hit one of my nerves with this, and I know we should do better. I don’t know how to fix the system though.

22

I’ve noticed a recent and disturbing trend – access to many online journals has become restricted. Even as an alumnus (and sometime Visiting Scientist), I do NOT have access to some online journals at my college, even at University terminals. In particular, I can’t get at anything on JSTOR. Some journals (like extreme back issues of The Journal of the Royal Society of London from the 18th century) are essentially only available through them and online. The only way I can get them is to pay the access rates. If these were something nominal, like the copying fees of ten cents a page, that wouldn’t be bad, but they charge fees of $25 or more per article.

And it’s not just (to most folks, not to me) obscure old journals that treat you this way. There are several up-to-date journals that are only available online that I can’t access. I can, of course, get to the physical archived journals (the ones, at least, that aren’t in storage), but there is increasing presure to sequester these somewhere else, and go to all-online.
I definitely see less availability and access to journals, ironically at a time when there is such an explosion in their number and diversity.

23

You’re right - and a lot of this is tied to the licensing restrictions and costs that libraries have to deal with. We’ve gone through two major journal cuts in the last 4 years at MPOW because journal prices keep increasing, but our acquisition budgets remain flat. Often database vendors base their prices on the FTE for the institution - and if we opened up database access to everyone who walks in the door, our prices would be that much higher.

I’m not going to say we’re at all happy about this, not in the least. I will say that we cannot change things alone and need scholars and the public to get involved to speak about how access to these resources is essential. Some thoughts that others much smarter than I have had to say on these topics:

The Great Disconnect, Scholars without Libraries (I recommend reading just about any of Barbara Fister’s posts over in IHE as they relate to libraries. Accessible writing and GOOD)

British Libraries Push back

Access Denied / Giving 'til it hurts (read the comments as well)

Feeling pointy - this is more internal-library focused in terms of what we deal with, but could be interesting as well.

Finally, Kevin Smith at Duke University’s Scholarly Communications blog. It tends to be slightly more focused on copyright issues, so it’s hard to point to a specific post, but these are the issues that we’re dealing with.

24

Which is exactly why scientists should be publishing only in Open Access Journals and assist in building peer-reviewed journal structures there. In an open Access presentation I went to last year or so, they pointed out how the normal publishing cycle basically puts tax payer’s money into private companies: the universities and the professors that work there are paid by taxes, but both when publishing the knowledge generated this way flows into the private publishing company, and again when buying the journal, the money from the library budget goes there, at rising costs.

A recent study showed that the scientists have a small attitude problem, though: a majority likes to use open access sources, but hardly anybody publishes in open access. Partly it’s an egg-hen-problem: nobody wants to publish/review in open access journals because they have no reputation; because nobody publishes/reviews in open access journals, they have no reputation.

The only way to change this, if insight isn’t forthcoming, will be the rising costs becoming unaffordable soon for libraries as well as the prof.s own budget.

25

The other side of this is the tenure system in academia. There are departments where I work that will not consider peer-reviewed, open-access journals as valid for tenure. There are departments that will, but until there is a shift in what’s considered publication for tenure and a university or discipline level acceptance of OA journals, this will continue to be part of the problem.

26

This trend, inasmuch as it is one, is hardly new.Ever since journals have gone online, those that are published by commercial publishers and by learned societies have mostly restricted access quite strictly, to institutional subscribers, which, in practice, mostly means university libraries and the registered students and staff there. A while back, libraries often had a lax attitude to this and would allow members of the public in the library building to use their terminals to access subscribed journals, but the copyright holders have been cracking down, and forcing libraries to restrict usage to registered users only.

The commercial publishers are mostly just out to screw as many bucks as they can out of the system. Learned societies and the like, though, go back and forth, and will sometimes make their archives available openly. (But having done that, a few months or years later they may change their minds and restrict them to subscribers again. Many learned societies depend quite a lot on the money they make from journal subscriptions.) This happened with the Royal Society publications a little while ago.

JSTOR, however, have recently gone the other way and opened up their older archives.

In my opinion, the long term trend is toward open access online publishing, which benefits just about everybody involved (academic authors, readers, the public, libraries, and university budgets) except for the publishers who profit from the traditional system. At present, though, it is a huge battle as commercial academic publishers fight like alley-cats to preserve their very profitable situation, and as people figure out a viable model for financing open access publishing (it is a lot cheaper, than paper publishing, but there are still costs). As I said above, there are lots of open access journals now. The problem is that only a few of of them have yet attained the status of being prestigious, respected journals, but more and more of them seem likely to do so before long. (And it is not as though there are not a huge number of crappy journals that charge a subscription price, sometimes a mind-bogglingy high one. One of the many ironies of academic publishing is that the best journals, because they have lots of subscribers, tend to be relatively cheap, whereas the crappy ones - that will just occasionally publish a paper that some researcher somewhere really, really needs to see - are often much more expensive.)

27

This is a very good point. The intent and purpose of journals, after all, is to publish a very new discovery now, before a congress in four years, or a fully researched book in 6 years. Which is why they’re most important in natural sciences, (and books play a second fiddle, only as basic text books and for collecting the congress papers).

But to get an introduction into a subject, you read a text book, a general introduction, or even simpler an encyclopedia entry - which will have (and wikipedia is good in this regard, too!) a list of further works to this topic. For the general laymen, that’s often enough information, any further details are tiring at this point.
If you’re going to write a paper, or are genuinly interested enough to start a full research, you use library catalogues with key words and systematic notation, and bibliographies for a subject.

If the interested lay person just wants to know what’s been recently discovered in a field, the “Science” page in a better newspaper (SZ over here) each day, or monthly a lay persons science journal (PM, Geo/ Nat. Geographic, Bild der Wissenschaft over here), plus watching good lay-science TV reports (Quarks, W wie Wissen, Bublath, Welt der Forschung etc. over here), keeps one updated on major scientific developments without being overwhelmed by scientifc language in one specific article.

28

Wow. They seriously need to update their ideas then. I know of several open access journals, in various different disciplines, that very well respected in their fields, and better than a lot of the traditionally published journals. As I said in my previous post, it is true that a lot of open access journals are low prestige, but then so are the vast majority of traditionally published journals.

Universities are shooting themselves in the foot with this attitude. Subscription costs of traditional journals are a major cost.

29

You’re right. Unfortunately, these tend to fall along disciplinary lines - it’s not the university itself (I used poor phrasing in the portion you quoted) saying they’re not valid, but the discipline (less common in the sciences, more common in the humanities/some of the social sciences) The university level, though, is where the changes can begin - a statement from the provost level that peer-reviewed OA journals are valid for tenure and promotion will be a start, but ultimately the disciplines will have to state this too.

30

Nowadays, though, most of the decent popular-press articles will include a link to the original paper on the Arxiv, so a layman who wants to read further can easily find that one paper, at least. And it’s not too hard, once there, to get the citation list from that paper, to see what papers they’re referencing, or what papers are referencing them, to get a fuller picture of the topic.

31

This is a problem in chemistry. Unless your at a research jugernaught, you will have very few journals. As it happens, my current location is university affiliated, but I personally cannot access the journals. I have to email someone else to get them. It’s annoying.

Most likely, you will have to get used to digging through stacks at the closest university. Also, get a subscription of your own for your most relevant journals.

32

njtt wrote:

Your own statement indicates indicates that this manifestly IS new – since this summer libraries have been restricting access to these journals, whereas before they were not. The downloading of a huge amount from JSTOR is the apparent reason for the crackdown, and that was only a few months ago.

undoubtedly true – they’re charging outrageous rates.
[/quote]

Learned societies and the like, though, go back and forth, and will sometimes make their archives available openly. (But having done that, a few months or years later they may change their minds and restrict them to subscribers again. Many learned societies depend quite a lot on the money they make from journal subscriptions.) This happened with the Royal Society publications a little while ago.

JSTOR, however, have recently gone the other way and opened up their older archives.

[/quote]

Thanks for that, but I notice that conspicuously missing from their list are the ones that are most useful, and the ones I’d like to get – things like the Journal of the Royal Society of London.

33

Maybe the library or libraries you have been using just started doing so this summer. The one I used to use until recently started restricting access for outsiders a few years ago.

Royal Society publications are not in JSTOR because they run their own archives. They are one of those learned societies that have gone back and forth on open access, but, going by this page, a good bit of of their stuff is open access now. (Admittedly, that page is not terribly clear, but if you know what you want you might find it worth trying to look for it on their site.)

Incidentally, there is not, and never has been, any Journal of the Royal Society of London. Their four main journals are Philosophical Transactions (A and B) and Proceedings (A and B) (plus a few other odds and ends). Philosophical Transactions is the one that began back in the 17th century. The A and B issues of each journal are for physical and biological sciences respectively. (My apologies if you already knew this, but it occurred to me that searching for Journal of the Royal Society of London might be what is hanging you up.)

Just on the off chance that you are referring to the Royal Society of Medicine (a different organization, but one that does have a Journal of …), much of their stuff is openly available through Pub Med.

Much of the problem with a lot of the open access stuff that is out there now is that it is disorganized and hard to track down, and sometimes you can’t really tell whether you will be allowed to download something or not until you actually try. I have had both pleasant and unpleasant surprises in that regard.

34

Missed edit window:

I just found this, which should b good news for you, Cal: