Hello all, As a grad student, I have never, ever had to pay for an article, even when I was an undergraduate at a small liberal arts school of less than 350 students. Librarians have been invaluable in helping me to acquire materials through inter-library loan, including faxed or e-mailed scans of articles that weren't available at my small school but were at a larger university nearby. This service is free, and assures that no one should ever face restricted access; if it's not at your library, it's going to be at another one (my understanding is that this works for public libraries as well). I would also to thank the many librarians and work study students who tirelessly scan, photocopy, and mail articles to those in need.
As a graduate student, I am also learning to navigate the peer-review waters, and while I acknowledge the problems with the system I would also have to strongly agree that we shouldn't replace it with what Petr Smilauer called "publishing anarchism." I am in graduate school to develop breadth and depth in my knowledge base and acquire skills, and balancing teaching, research, and coursework responsibilities takes up the bulk of my time. From my perspective, the peer-review system is a highly efficient way of distributing the effort that goes into disseminating information. I receive e-mailed tables of contents, I peruse online databases like Web of Knowledge and Google Scholar, and I utilize references to find what I need so I can quickly and efficiently return to the task at hand: learning. While it might be a valuable exercise, I certainly don't have the time or the knowledge base to muck through articles on dozens (or hundreds) of websites, deciding which is credible enough to cite in my term paper or the lit review of my thesis. So, as with librarians, I would like to take this as an opportunity to thank the reviewers who volunteer their time, energy and expertise to making sure that I don't have to. This doesn't mean I take everything I read at face value, but I do think that the quality and integrity of my academic experience is much greater because I can train a more fine-tuned eye on research design and conclusions because the broad work of weeding out and editing has already been done. Thanks, Jacquelyn ************************ Jacquelyn Gill Graduate Research Assistant Jack Williams Lab University of Wisconsin - Madison Department of Geography 550 North Park St. Madison, WI 53706 608.890.1188 (phone) 608.265.9331 (fax) ----- Original Message ----- From: Petr Smilauer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Tuesday, May 22, 2007 7:31 am Subject: Re: [ECOLOG-L] SCIENCE Access to information To: [email protected] > Dear all, > > Wayne Tyson wrote: > > ... > > What I would like to see is a shift from publication in the ripoff > > journals to self-publishing on open-source websites (saving > mountains > > of Georgia clay and forests of "pulpwood"), casting all research and > > > scholarly work to the winds for ALL peers to review and reference, > > thus eventually permitting MERIT to survive and the BS to compost. > > > > While I could write authors and get papers that way, the amount of > > time involved, both for me and the authors, is, in my view, an > > unnecessary burden in the 21st century. Multiply this by everyone > > searching the Internet, and the burden is monumental. It is not > > I believe this is rather unfortunate argument. If such a "publishing > anarchism" > would have its way, we would spend much more time sorting out > credibility of each published piece of results than we do with approaching > authors or searching through the current databases on Internet. > > Also, the proportion of rubbish in the "published" (publicly exposed) > papers would increase dramatically, if the authors would not face the > prospect of their approach, results, and conclusions being checked by > the experts in the same field. The large amount of "gray publications" > is not only the result of the existence of high publishing barrier, but > also the result of really bad science done at many places. > > In my opinion, the peer review is, despite all the faults of its actual > state, really necessary to stay and abandoning it would be a disaster > for scientific progress. On the other hand, the paper of Bergstrom & > Bergstrom quoted here before tells interesting story and gives the > recipe. Non-profit publishers are currently in a strong position and > it can be further improved by qualified decisions of submitting > authors. But the price of publishing cannot be driven down to "free", > only at a huge expense of deteriorating the quality of communication > among scientists. > > > Petr Smilauer > Ceske Budejovice > Czech Republic
