This blog entry will raise questions rather than answer them. A post in the listserv CHMINF-L by Val Tucci of The College of New Jersey made a reference to a letter to the editor In the July 25, 2011 issue of the Chemical and Engineering News written by Wendy Quinn, a librarian at AMRI. She brings up the rising costs of technical publications in electronic format. She quotes Stewart Lyman, owner and manager of Lyman Biopharma in Seattle who states that scientists at small biotech companies are reading fewer journal articles because of lack of access to them. He continues by saying that the decrease in scientific reading leads to a decrease in innovation.
There is certainly no argument that limited library budgets in academia and industry does impede the access to information. But impeding it in my opinion does not mean preventing the flow of information from going to the creator to someone else who needs it sometime in the future. If a scientist or professor had a subscription to all relevant journals, how much could he or she read? Journal articles by their nature are very detailed and takes much time to read thoroughly.
Almost all publishers provide access to abstracts of journal articles for free on the web. Very often a researcher can understand the research findings in a paper by just reading a summary. Academics can use interlibrary loan and industrial scientists can use the pay per view option to purchase the full text of articles they really need for retrospective research or current awareness.
This problem will not go away since there is no way that publishers will lower their costs. Corporate and Academic libraries must pursue the just in time model of providing information even more. I think that scientists need to be careful about selecting materials that they must read.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment