So, this morning Dr. Isis laid in bed, drinking her coffee, and reading articles. She got to thinking about the days before online articles were so readily available. Days when she actually had to (GASP) walk to the library. She knows that she probably missed some important articles during the colder months when she was too much of a wimp to leave her office and brave the snow.
As an aside, Dr. Isis once showed the following picture to a young member of her family and told said member that she wanted to find this piece of furniture for her family room. Said family member failed to recognize the importance of said piece of furniture.
Figure 1: Awesome
But I digress...
Dr. Isis is a huge fan of emailed tables of content and articles in press and loves the online availability of journal articles through her friendly institutional library. Dr. Isis adores the PDF. The less often I have to tredge over to the library the better.
Apparently people around the world agree with Dr. Isis's love of convenience and this has her most favorite scientific organization in the whole wide world all up in arms over Open Access. If you had asked Dr. Isis a few years ago what she thought of Open Access (when she was but a doe-eyed and eager student), she would have been all on board. But now Dr. Isis is more hesitant. The real question is, if everything is Open Access, who pays for the content? And who pays for the peer review process?
The answer is, Dr. Isis does and she has a family to feed and research to support. Dr. Isis pays for it either through increased dues, or meeting fees, or publication fees, or all of the above (and, let's be honest...it will likely be all of the above with time). Dr. Isis thinks that's totally uncool.
So, I appreciate the argument that information should be free. If its not, then how will little Billy's mother, who is currently surfing the web for the cure for his life-threatening illness, ever get access to my article that could save little Billy's life? How about if we make a deal, advocates of Open Access? You take your grubby hands out of my pockets and I promise to send little Billy's mommy a reprint.
(Dr. Isis is a bit fired up about this issue after recently paying some assorted publication-type fees)
If journals lose the ability to peer review and referee content, then we may miss out on some great discoveries as they become buried in the deluge of crap that will become available.
And speaking of great discoveries, my little child discovered this morning that boys have nipples too.
Figure 2: Sexy Beast
8 comments:
I was a grad student well before e-mailed TOCs. One of my rituals that I dearly miss was getting a gel running and then going down to the library to browse newly arrived journals, each day's complement of which were placed on a special display rack. The breadth of the journals I browsed was much greater than now. Now I really only pay attention to the TOCs of about 20 journals, and figure I'll hear about other relevant shit through the grapevine.
I also had another ritual I enjoyed as a grad student after getting a gel running, which involved stepping outside.
BTW, Isis, your plan for posting only once a day seems to be failing miserably!
I know, PhysioProf. Isis realizes how pathetic she is. Believe me. But you see, every single person that is important to my work is on vacation this week, leaving me to write articles and plan grants. There really is a limit to how much a single Dr. Isis cvan look at a single article at any given time. So, because the halls of my fair institution are abandoned, I post. The frequency will probably decrease next week.
Believe it or not, Isis already has another post planned for today.
And, was your second ritual Frisbee? Because, if it was, you are even more awesome than I thought
And, was your second ritual Frisbee?
Umm, yeah, Frisbee!! Sure! Frisbee!!
LOLZ!
The frequency will probably decrease next week.
That's disappointing, Isis. You really have a nice way with the English sentence.
One of the things about writing of which I have become convinced is that people can learn to organize their sentences into decent paragraphs, and paragraphs into decent essays/papers/grants/etc. But the ability to construct a good English sentence is something people either have or they don't; it can't really be taught.
That's very kind and tells me that you were not one of the reviewers of Dr. Isis's last article.
The breast/basketball shot is gross.
Although I love the emailed TOC feature, for the life of me, I cannot figure out how to access the articles directly. When I click on them in my inbox, the journal always takes me to a page where it wants me to pay (it doesn't seem to recognize that I am on a university computer). I always have to go to the journal through the library page, which is sadly often enough effort to keep me from reading. I am lazy and useless.
I've actually been switching from emailed TOCs to RSS feeds. I find it a lot easier to star/note one of the papers to return to later.
Add to that the RSS feed of various Pubmed searches, and literature ninja-dom is right around the corner.
@ce - I hate not being able to go right to the pdf in that case as well. Really, that's my rationale for OpenAccess. Pure laziness.
Wow, Nat- hadn't considered the RSS feed option. Will be signing up for that promptly. Thanks!
CEiA, Nat beat me to it. I RSS feed EVERYTHING! When I fill out IRBs and IACUCs and other such forms they usually ask how often you literature search. My answer is "daily." I have a group of keywords I keep in PubMed and then I check my Google Reader in the morning to get my blog and science fixes. Also, I love the feature on Web of Science that allows you to crawl through a paper's past and present by clicking the papers that cite a paper or are cited by said paper. Just PubMed-ing now adays is for suckers.
But, then I have a specific area that I am interest and I get the TOCs from those journals. Then I can read papers in my more general area and stay up on the who's who and what not.
RSS is my shnizz.
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