The second segment, New England Journal of Medicine's 200th
Anniversary, talked of the many contributions the journal has made, not only to
the medical world, but ultimately to the whole world. It pointed out early on
in the segment its contrast to Elsevier, saying that they make their articles
freely available, whereas Elsevier wants to charge people to read published articles
that are supposed to be made available to the public in the first place.
The third segment, The Changing Nature of Knowledge, talked
about how the access of knowledge has changed. Especially noted is the access of
knowledge through the internet and how you could just enter your research topic
in a search engine and have a plethora of information, including forum
discussions and the like, discussing that topic. This available knowledge is a
good thing because it helps countless other gain that knowledge and use it to
better their lives.
The common theme that I found through these three segments was
effects of how available knowledge and information is to the general public and
scholars. My reaction to the first story was that I was pretty surprised. In
the segment, it said that Elsevier stated that their prices for each article
have dropped. If that is so, why are so many schools libraries suffering from
the high prices of journal subscriptions? Why would librarians make such statements
as done on the segment? My reaction to the second segment was appreciation for a
medical journal that believes in the general public and their important role in
the medical world. I loved the fact that they considered the availability of
the journal to people in countries who could not afford to pay for them. You
could tell what their goals are by what they are doing and that they genuinely
care about people and not about earning money. Finally, my reaction to the
third segment was mainly just agreement with what the author talked about in
his book. I support the internet and its role in furthering the knowledge of
many people. A word that has been used a lot in my post here is availability,
what I think is key in knowledge! It needs to be available for others, in order
for life to keep going.
These stories completely relate to me, especially in my role
as an undergraduate researcher. The answer is in that one word alone-
researcher! How can I research if there is no available information? How can I
research if there are no journals due to the cost of the subscriptions? The
internet helps not only me, but it helps the university; it is the central meeting
place for millions of people basically to get whatever they want. Restriction on
knowledge is absolute madness. I understand that authors need to get paid for
the extensive work they do on researching, but to deny people knowledge through
journal articles is absolutely ridiculous. Knowledge is essential for us to
become experts ourselves; we are the next generation of teachers, scientists,
engineers, etc. We need these articles, whether it be for homework or for our
own personal interest.
You did a great job on your post, but I do want to clear up one point. Researchers generally don't get paid at all for their article submissions, and they're not generally asking to get paid. Part of my job description is to do research and present that research. So UWG pays for me to write articles and prepare conference presentations (not per article, but as part of the duties I'm expected to do to earn my salary). After a certain number of years I'll submit all of my achievements for review in the hopes of being promoted and getting tenure. Part of that consideration is how well do I teach and all of that, but part of that is also how much do I publish and present my work? So, again, UWG will (hopefully) reward me for those publications in the form of a raise when I get promoted. It would be neat to get paid per article, but it's far more important to me to be published and have as many people as possible actually read what I wrote. (When tenure review committees look at your list of publications, they'll look at how important those articles were, which is often measured by how many times that article is cited by other scholars. Having more people read my article increases the chance that someone will cite me!)
ReplyDeleteThe problem, though, is that these giant publishing companies don't add as much value as they used to. Once upon a time, doing the typesetting and printing and mailing of paper journals was a lot of work. Now that it's all online, it's much easier to produce a journal, as long as the rest of the workflow stays the same (articles for free, peer reviews done for free). Despite this shift, the publishers just keep jacking up their prices. They claim to be covering the costs of handling soooo many submissions and whatnot, but they're paying record profits to their shareholders, so these price increases are way more than what they need to cover costs.
So you're paying for me to produce the articles (through tuition and/or taxes, since some research is funded by grants from government agencies rather than by the researcher's university), and then having to pay again to actually see my article. Is that fair? (Can you tell that I don't think so?)
I'm a big fan of Open Access!