Survey: How many refereed journals can your library NOT afford? Albert Henderson 17 Jan 2001 14:54 UTC
The idea that access is obstructed by budgets is very interesting. The bottleneck in science communications is based on the theory that researchers can locate useful materials through databases and citations in the literature. The databases have reduced their coverage, also thanks to stingy budgets. The National Library of Medicine bibliographies, which in early days attemped to be comprehensive, covered less than ten percent of the biomedical literature according to the centenery essay by Martin Cummings. Analyses of other discipline-wide databases reveal similar shortcomings. Like the libraries themselves, the secondary information services are shrinking in comparison to the totality of publication. Some beancounters will argue that most journals / papers are not worth covering. If this is true, then money invested in research is wasted. Compare the growth of financial investments in academic research with the number of papers recognized by the National Science Board in STATISTICAL INDICATORS OF SCIENCE & ENGINEERING. Spending has doubled and redoubled while the total number of recognized papers creeps upward. The percentage of U.S. papers has fallen, contradicting claims of leadership! Clearly, sponsored research is aimed primarily at keeping our most profitable universities well in the black. Agency and university managers have no interest in productivity. The real scandal is the relationship of science agencies to research universities, as I describe at length in "Undermining Peer Review" in the current issue of SOCIETY 38(2):47-54 2001. Best wishes, Albert Henderson Former Editor, PUBLISHING RESEARCH QUARTERLY 1994-2000 <70244.1532@compuserve.com> -------------Forwarded Message----------------- Date: 1/14/2001 10:42 PM RE: Survey: How many refereed journals can your library NOT afford? It would be very helpful if those of you who have access to the data could reply to the following 3 questions: (1) How many refereed journals does your library subscribe to? (By "subscribe," I mean either Subscription (S) or License (L), on-paper or on-line, or both.) (2) What proportion is that, of the total number of refereed journals that are published (anywhere) that could conceivably be relevant to the researchers (in all fields) at your institution? (3) If we now add in your total potential annual budget for Pay-Per-View (P), in addition to the prior annual figures for S and L: What proportion of all the published papers in all the refereed journals of potential relevance to your researchers can you afford to purchase through Pay-Per-View? The reason I have requested the S/L/P data in this rather counterintuitive form is that I think these figures will prove to be very revealing. And it is precisely these figures -- the figures for all the papers your researchers MIGHT have wanted to read, if only they could access and afford them all -- that tell the true story of what the current status quo is costing research and researchers in lost impact and access. And what freeing it all would gain them. We are all too accustomed to think in terms of the journals our institutions CAN afford to access, rather than the ones they cannot. This short-sighted reckoning might be what is holding us back -- or preventing us from seeing the urgency and advantages of -- freeing this literature immediately through self-archiving. Here is a prediction: The data will show that even the very richest institutions, with the biggest S/L/P budgets (e.g., Harvard), will only be able to afford a minority of the total relevant annual corpus. And most institutions will be able to afford much less. This means that MOST of the refereed research literature is inaccessible to MOST researchers on the planet -- which is particularly scandalous, given that ALL of that literature is a give-away FROM all those researchers, and that there is no longer any reason, hence any justification, whatsoever, for ALL of them not having access to ALL of it, for free, right now. Here's hoping that the data you provide in response to these three questions (plus the January 23 release of the Eprints 1.1 institutional archive-creating software <http://www.eprints.org>, compliant with the January 23 release of the OAI 1.0 Open Archives protocol <http://www.openarchives.org>) will at last get us all to the optimal and inevitable in 2001! -------------------------------------------------------------------- Stevan Harnad harnad@cogsci.soton.ac.uk Professor of Cognitive Science harnad@princeton.edu Department of Electronics and phone: +44 23-80 592-582 Computer Science fax: +44 23-80 592-865 University of Southampton http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/ Highfield, Southampton http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/ SO17 1BJ UNITED KINGDOM