Oh-oh, Olivia Judson is not up-to-speed on Open Access, Open Science and Science 2.0 stuff - though the article is interesting and thought-provoking:
As a system, it was a little clumsy -- photocopying was a bore, and if I wanted to spend a couple of months writing somewhere other than my office, I had to take boxes of papers with me -- but it worked. I knew what I had and where it was.
Then the scientific journals went digital. And my system collapsed.
On the good side, instead of hauling dusty volumes off shelves and standing over the photocopier, I sit comfortably in my office, downloading papers from journal Web sites.
On the bad side, this has produced informational bedlam.
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One caveat. I say "access to information is easier and faster than ever before." With respect to scientific information, this is true for people within universities, but not for those without them. One of the consequences of the scientific journals going digital is that it has become harder for members of the public to get access to original scientific information. It used to be the case, for example, that anyone could get permission to spend a day at the library at Imperial College; once there, they could read any of the journals on the library shelves. Now, subscriptions to the paper editions of many journals have been stopped -- the journals are no longer physically there -- and only members of the university are allowed access to the online versions. Some journals give free access, at least to back-issues; but many do not. Then, if you are not a member of a university and you want to read some articles, they may cost you as much as $30 each. I think this is a pity. Perhaps not many people want to read original scientific research; but somehow, it seems against the spirit of the enterprise.
Readers (and there are over 200 comments there) mostly give advice on how to use Zotero and similar tech stuff, but there is not enough about OA and how much has happened about it over the past few years. It is unfortunate she cannot make it to ScienceOnline09 in January, to hear the cutting edge thinking on all of the topics she touched on in this essay.
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I thought it was interesting that she used Florida Entomologist as an example of a hard to find journal when it was the first journal to have its entire publication history available for free online and at the time period she was discussing, was one of the easiest to obtain.
Hi, my sentiments exactly. It's hard to get access to journals unless you are in a university and even then, they may not subscribe to a journal you need. And there's still the endless searching on the publisher's webpage for the link to the PDF of the journal article itself.
I have been trying out a new reference software - WizFolio. It has an interesting feature in which after you search on Pubmed etc, you can save it into WizFolio and there is a "Locate PDF" button which automatically picks up free PDFs if there are any. If not it will still go to the publisher's page.
I've seen WizFolio. It's OK. It's not as good as CiteULike or Mendeley. And the WizFolio marketing is disgustingly aggressive which is a put-off for many, including myself.