Dr. Richard Holliman
Senior Lecturer in Science Communication
Department of Environment, Earth and Ecosystems
Faculty of Science
The Open University
Walton Hall
Milton Keynes
MK7 6AA
Tel +44 (0)1908 654646

Select http://www.open.ac.uk/personalpages/r.m.holliman for more information about my work.

Select http://isotope.open.ac.uk for the Isotope website.

From: Francis Sedgemore [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: 08 September 2011 09:45
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [PSCI-COM] Serials crisis and corn laws

That is certainly a problem for science journalists whose online wibblings are increasingly followed by comments complaining about lack of access to the source material, and absence of proper citation of original papers.

When it comes to science with a high news value in the UK, this often means papers published in Nature. The publishers of Nature have a reputation for granting easy access to journalists to all those papers flagged by the editorial team as worthy of public spin, and, unlike AAAS/Science Magazine, they do not discriminate against freelancer journalists (grrr!) and bloggers. We science hacks have free access to at least part of Nature's output, and with this write journalistic articles, blog posts or what have you, and include links to the original papers.

The poor lay reader, on the other hand, is then faced with an abstract and little or no more. I can understand their frustration, but sympathise only to a degree. If the reader really really wants to view the entire paper, they can access it without a personal subscription provided they are patient (difficult, I know, in this age of googlegratification), and either visit a library which carries the journal, or source the paper from authors willing to provide PDFs to serious enquirers. The latter may be against the rules, strictly speaking, but the journals know it happens, and do not seem particularly bothered by the practice. In the end it comes down to good judgement.

What Nature and some other science journals are doing more and more these days is provide free online access to supplementary material in the form of news articles, blogs and so on. One could criticise the publisher for the way in which it selects material for public release, but at least it is making some attempt to be inclusive, while at the same time operating a commercial business.

The problem is with the more specialised journals, and there is no easy answer to this. But it is simply not enough to proclaim, Monbiot-like from the barricades, that all information must be free, and fantasise about publishers' heads arranged on pikes along Carlton House Terrace. The villains and heroes argument is just silly.

Francis

I remember a session at the science communication conference a couple of years ago discussing the gap between current social research and the science communication community.  One reason for the gap might be that we don’t have access to academic libraries and can’t justify a speculative spend on reading a piece of research we have already funded.  Imagine telling any other funder they should pay to see your results.