I’d like to respond to a comment Emanual Donchin, a council representative to the Council of Graduate Departments of Psychology, made about the ease of accessing journal publications for scholars with library privileges. (Don Dewsbury distributed his letter.)
Of course the entire policy is a bit bizarre, including the NIH policy. After all, any scholar with Library privileges can get these days PDF copies of just about any paper published in any scholarly journal. Who needs “Word files” of submitted manuscripts? And why should NIH, or the Universities, pay such huge sums for a service of nugatory value?
Being able to get ready access to journal articles is not necessarily this simple for every scholar. Certainly, most academic libraries try their darnedest to get the publications from APA. But libraries are less likely to hold or to provide direct access to journals with smaller circulations, less status, or those that began publishing more recently.
Also, smaller colleges are even less likely to have access to these publications. Usually they only subscribe to a portion of the journals from any given publisher. Instutional subscriptions, those that libraries pay, are much more expensive than personal ones. They may differ by thousands of dollars.
And with the big publishers hawking large packages, smaller schools (really most schools) decide to only subscribe to a few publishers — most get their electronic journals through databases from larger distributors, such as EBSCO or Gale (InfoTrac). These tend to be good deals, but libraries and librarians have little control over when wanted journals are cut and which years are included. Publishers may supress journals for several months to years, hoping that libraries will buy direct subscriptions of, often, rather expensive journals.
It’s difficult to buy both the individual journals and the large packages, with recent issues supressed, often libraries don’t have those which scholars want most.
Inter Library Loan is an option, but it can be expensive for libraries as well. Other countries, developing countries, have even less access to these resources.
Am I advocating for the fee? Nope. Just want you to know that easy access to library copies might not be so easy after all.
For excellent information and commentary on scholarly communication, read the Scholarly Communications @ Duke blog.
