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
