Off The Shelf

One of the most annoying parts of research is finding a reference to a great article, and then not having instant access online. Whether you’re a procrastinator waiting until the day before your paper is due, or just an impatient researcher who wants to read everything right away, no one likes to discover that what they want won’t be available right now.

Like many learners, I didn’t like to wait for interlibrary loan either. My solution while working on my degree was to spend a Saturday morning driving to various university libraries with a notepad, pen, and a sack of quarters for the copier.

Not everyone is willing to take my decidedly old-fashioned approach to bypassing interlibrary loan. These days there are some web-based alternatives forming.

DeepDyve is a scholarly article rental service. For 99 cents you can read an article online for 24 hours. No printing. No saving. Their collection is heavily weighted toward scientific journals, which can be extremely expensive. New car expensive, not just used car expensive.

Of course, many journal publishers are happy to sell you an article permanently. But at $25 each, that can be a very expensive way to do research. For the focused researcher, a rental for a day may be just what’s needed.

Some researchers aren’t content to pay any money for scholarly articles, and instead have resorted to the same type of file sharing that music lovers have used. Just as sharing music with strangers has run afoul of copyright law, swapping journal articles runs the same risks. A research article in the Internet Journal of Medical Informatics investigated the breadth of file sharing on one internet site. They estimated $700,000 worth of losses to journal publishers in the 6 month period of their study.

We’re still in the early days of scholarly information online. There are plenty of business models (legal and not) waiting to be tried. Who knows what the landscape will look like in another 10 years. Perhaps the journal subscription will disappear. Or perhaps libraries will simply be portals for content, rather the warehouses of information. In any case, the options for accessing scholarly articles are increasing. Just try to keep your discussion post from turning into a court case!

- Erin

While we all know to read critically any information we locate on the free world wide web, sometime there’s a tendency to forget to read critically when it comes to published magazines and journals. Especially when it comes to Peer Reviewed journals, as they are referred to as the Gold Standard of Academic Publishing.

But as shown in this humorous account from professor Dr. Rick Trebino about attempting to publish in one of those journals, there clearly is room for bias and missing opposing voices. Dr. Trebino attempted to publish a comment to a scientific study published in the “most prestigious journal” of his field that he found to have drawn conclusions on badly calculated data. When he attempts to publish a comment pointing out that the study is wrong and how, a very long and ridiculous process ensued.

The reason this sadly funny situation is important is because it points out that bias does exist and some voices are not heard in scholarly publishing, and mistakes do happen and make their way through peer review onto the printed page. Always reading critically looking at the conclusions the researchers have drawn, the research methodology they used and how well they executed it, the data collected, and other aspects of scholarly papers is a good practice. The fact that the paper Dr. Trebino discredited was published in the first place shows that even when a study is reviewed by 3 scholarly reviewers, mistakes do make their way to publication only to be refuted later.

-Sommer

While searching the library databases, you may have noticed that not everything is available in full text from the library. Why is that? Is it because the librarians want to annoy you?

No, of course not. There are several reasons that you may not have access to the full text you want. Some are economic, some are historical, and some are a bit of both. Here are some of the common reasons you may run into article records with only an abstract:

• When computerized databases first appeared, they couldn’t handle full text. The technology just wasn’t ready yet, so the index without full text is what showed up first.
• There isn’t as much demand to digitize back in time. Most journals today automatically create a copy for online distribution, but digitizing everything from 1974 is not a very pressing priority.
• Including older items raises the cost of library databases, even though the older content is in the least demand. Libraries have a hard enough time paying for recent content, so database companies are reluctant to raise prices just to include older stuff.
• Some current journals are so expensive that the database companies don’t include them in their packages. When a journal subscription can cost as much as a small car, adding everything can make a database unaffordable to libraries.
• Journals want to push paper sales. If a journal has an embargo, which stops the database from having the most recent issues, libraries are “forced” to buy both the paper journal and the digital version.
• Some journals want to do all full-text sales themselves. They’re happy to let people learn that a journal article exists, but they also want to maximize the profit from the full text.

Even though you’re using these databases as part of your education, the academic publishing industry is a business. That’s an important fact to remember whenever you are looking at information – knowledge isn’t just power, it’s also money as well. And that will affect what you can access and when.

- Erin