Accessing Journals from Outside Academia
I’m going to be out in the big scary world soon, but I still want to be immersed in my love of science. I ask you, the science blogosphere, how to grab my beloved science journal articles without being Warren Buffet.
Today marks the first day for 6 years where I’m not a university student. As I continue to wrap up my MSc thesis, my name has been taken off the door of my old office, my ID card has ceased to work, and no doubt the monkeys who run the IT services at my university have found a way to make my account information physically explode. Another thing I’ve now lost is free and open access to scientific papers published in journals such as Nature, Science, Geochemica et Cosmochimica Acta and Earth and Planetary Science Letters, among others.
I’m obsessed with science. However, once I’m done with my MSc, I’m off into the workforce for a time (potentially a long time). I haven’t ruled out diving into a PhD at some point, and in the mean time I want to continue to stay abreast with current research and I want to talk about research on this blog. Though subscriptions to the usual suspects (Nature and Science) aren’t out of my grasp, accessing articles from large journal databases such as Elsevier’s Science Direct will cost me US$30 per journal article. And frankly, that’s just ridiculous. I know how much work goes into research papers - but $30 each? So far as I’ve been able to tell, research isn’t funded from journal sales.
So, my question to the geo-blogosphere, and the science blogosphere in general is, what’s the best way of getting full-text journal papers from a range of publications for reasonable money when you’re not within easy reach of a university or well-equipped public library? Preferably without resorting to illegality.
Update: In a case of blissful geoblog serendipity, Andrew Alden of About: Geology has just published a blog entry on open online journals within minutes of me publishing this article. Do great minds ponder alike?
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February 25th, 2008 at 11:51 pm
Do any of your institutions’ alumni associations offer email accounts with shell access or the ability to run remote X sessions? That might be one way to preserve your old access privileges. I know UC alumni association membership comes with library privileges, but I don’t know if that extends to the use of the library proxy server for electronic journal subscriptions or not.
Anyway, I would ask a librarian about this before you leave.
So far as I’ve been able to tell, research isn’t funded from journal sales.
AFAIK, AGU runs things backwards from other professional societies, and uses the journals to subsidize the meetings.
February 25th, 2008 at 11:54 pm
AFAIK, AGU runs things backwards from other professional societies, and uses the journals to subsidize the meetings.
Well that’s positive. But you have to wonder if reducing the individual price of articles might bring them more funding. I still think $30 is excessive.
I’ll definitely have a question session with my friendly librarian before I properly leave. That’s a great suggestion.
February 26th, 2008 at 12:18 am
The best answer might well be working to change the laws, and failing that, the behavior of authors and publishers. But of course, that won’t be a quick solution.
Another more practical, though not necessarily quick or reliable, method might be to request copies from the authors directly. Most will be happy to send a reprint, and the enlightened will have a PDF or other electronic form to fire off quickly.
I wonder if interlibrary loan would work via a public library?
February 26th, 2008 at 8:53 pm
Yeah, I like the free beer at AGU but I think we’d be better off with cheaper page fees/individual article charges (though AGU papers are only $9 a pop)/a license server that actually works (grrr…).
February 27th, 2008 at 12:03 am
Serendipity! Actually I wrote the article a few years ago but blogged it yesterday because I forgot to put it in my newsletter (which went out with a generic machine-inserted link instead). Anyway, I’ve never had access to all the great journals since I left the USGS umpty-ump years ago. I just miss a lot of articles. I subscribe to Geology, GSA Bulletin, Eos and Annual Reviews Earth and just cadge other stuff here and there. Hence my article. As a journalist I can get advance PDFs, but there’s too many of them. Basically I don’t try to emulate the press; it’s a fight I can’t win. Besides, most of the research in Nature and Science that gets big press is actually old news or incremental advances.
Anyway, do try the department library and also cultivate your contacts in your favorite fields–the friendosphere, I suppose it is. And the company you work for surely gets some journals.
But my big tip is to prowl the meeting abstracts, and write to the authors of the cool stuff. Online abstracts are the cat’s pajamas.
February 28th, 2008 at 11:07 am
Open online access to scientific (geoscience) journals is indeed a problem.
The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) lists peer-reviewed scholarly open access journals.
The Geology list (with 57 geoscience journals) is at http://www.doaj.org/doaj?func=subject&cpid=82
I definitely hope for more free open access in the future - or at least cheaper access. Cheaper online subscriptions without the paper version would also help in certain situations.