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Why Do I Have to Pay for a Journal, Anyway?
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John W. Moore
University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI 53706-1396 |
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Note: |
This issue is out of print. |
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On several occasions within the past year or so I have been asked (or told), "Won't it be great when everything is available on the Internet (or CDs) and we can all get it free?" Let's examine this vision of the future in a couple of ways. Cyberbabble No, it won't be great when everything is available. It will probably require days to find what you want, assuming you have the time and the patience, which you probably don't. (I know I don't!) Looking for a needle in a haystack is nothing compared to finding the one piece of information you really need amid the vastness of the Internet. The same applies to the chemical research literature. Small wonder that, search tools and information specialists to the contrary notwithstanding, I have often heard chemists state that doing an experiment is less time consuming than looking to see whether it has already been done. Just making information available is not enough. Even with good tools, looking for a nugget of gold in a stream can be pretty frustrating, especially if you have no idea what stream to look in. And suppose the nugget turns out to be pyrite? The prospectors turned to assayers (chemists!) for quality control, and of course word-of-mouth told them which streams to try. The same applies to information about chemistry or chemistry education: we need some form of quality control to narrow our searches to the most productive information streams. Freedom of Information If everything is available, it's not free--a great deal of time will have to be expended to find it, and time is money. If quality control is applied, the proverbial haystack may become a pincushion, but those who provide the quality will need to be rewarded for their efforts. That also implies money, so no, we're not all going to be able to get all the information we want free. Stairways can be built up the tower of cyberbabble by carefully selecting and categorizing the information in our electronic storehouses, but that will take time, money, or both. It might be done if everyone were a good citizen who only published unique, concise accounts and categorized them using a language common to all. But even then some organization would be needed to specify what is meant by concise and common language. A Journal's Role Why do subscribers pay for journals? Ideally to obtain the quality control and organization so necessary for finding appropriate information. A journal should provide a high concentration of nuggets, most of them gold, on a regular basis. Its editors, reviewers, and staff must select information carefully, according to a known philosophy and rationale, and present the information in a well organized, engaging manner. This takes time and effort and does not come free, but it frees collectively a tremendous amount of time for readers. This results in overall savings that make the editorial process a net good. The myth that electronic dissemination makes information free ignores the editorial effort required to make information useful. Electronic delivery may save printing and trees, but these are far less costly for most journals than intellectual effort, even when much of the latter is done by volunteers. Information theory equates the negative of entropy with information, a formulation that we ignore at our peril. |
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Last Updated: April 26, 2001 Created: December 3, 1996 |
Created by: J. L. Holmes Comments to: jceonline@chem.wisc.edu |
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| © 1997 Division of Chemical Education, Inc., American Chemical Society. All rights reserved. | |