OK, I think I'm finally over all the sickness. So I'll hopefully be posting regularly again. It'll probably take me a while to catch up. I'm especially interested in the Davidson discussion which I've just not been cogent enough to say much in. However in the meantime I wonder if any readers use online digital libraries. I'm sure many of you are at academic institutions so your library already has digital access to most of the journals your library subscribes to. However for those of us still interested in academics but no longer formally in academics it's a bit of a problem.
Yes, in theory I could run up to the library every now and then, order such things via inter-library loan and have lots of photocopies. In practice I rarely have time to make it on campus anymore. Especially with the whole parking mess. When you have young kids and a business you fit your academics in when you can. Which means you save up library runs.
Now a year ago I was looking at online libraries like Questia. Questia has a nice two month trial but it's a bit fishy since they make you do a full sign up. Yeah. Sort of like those annoying book clubs that are easy to get into and hard to get out of. So I'm a bit spooked about doing the trial. The other problem with Questia is that while it seems to have a fair selection of books it has a horrible selection of journals.
Nothing is more annoying than doing a Google search, finding exactly what you're looking for, only to have it pop up on some "subscription only" journal web page. (Why does Google index those anyway?) Once again, yeah I could do the interlibrary loan business, but that's a hassle and probably by the time it'd arrive I'd forget why I wanted it in the first place.
Any suggestions? As to now I've been doing, for short searches, the tricks for accessing books via Google Books or Amazon's "look inside." But that only works for a few pages and not for journals.
Just a note. A few folks recommended Ebrary which has a version for individuals. I'm still trying to get it to work and will comment on it when it is working.
I have a similar problem at present. I've flirted with the idea of IngentaConnect, which has a lovely selection of journals; but the way it's set up looks like it would get very expensive very fast -- in many cases it would be cheaper just to go to the online sites for the publishers.
I'm using Ebrary right now. You have to put money in a kind of "fund" out of which it draws charges. (Roughly 0.25 per page) You can, however search and look without charge. It has a fair number of books although no journals that I can see. The screen dumps are so-so. Not as good as Google Books or even Amazon's "look inside" but not bad.
I'm running it under Safari but the custom application you install (probably a Java app) definitely isn't a terribly Mac-like port. It has that look like it was written back in the days of Sys9 (lots of "platinum" buttons, tabs, and so forth) Also the text in the content pane isn't anti-aliased and is all in the Geneva font. Reminds me of using computers back in college. The pages of the books themselves are, albeit not as nicely as most OSX text is. I'm not sure why that is.
Moving around is a bit slow, but not horribly so.
Still, the main thing I was looking for was less books than journals. So this is nice, but not quite the ideal.
If you do figure something out please post a new blog entry describing how you did it. However, I am pretty skeptical of finding something that works and at a reasonable price. The problem is that every profession erects barriers to entry to protect entrenched professionals. Academics either by choice or by accident seem to have chosen access to information as one of their main barriers to entry. When journal articles can be downloaded for 25 cents a piece the entry will be nil. This would be very good for the academy, but it will be fought every step of the way. Given how long it is taking for the barriers to entry to fall in the movie and music businesses, I would predict that it will be a long time before this happens :(
Right now I'm sticking with Ebrary. I appears to have most of the same books that Questia has, but charges nothing so long as you don't copy or print the text.
The downside is that it doesn't do Journals in the personal version. Which really sucks.
I'm thinking of contacting BYU to see if they have off campus access to their journal subscriptions for non-students.
Like you, I agree that $0.25 per journal article would be quite reasonable. Even more reasonable would be to have philosophers do what physicists and mathematicians have done: make all papers free and available from a central repository. Philosophy is very, very behind the times in that regard. So much for intellectual matters being a public good.
Which central repository are you referring to?
By the way I have been reconsidering my earlier comments about entrenched interests and I think that is only part of the problem. An even bigger problem is the fact that most, if not all, academic papers are written to be dry, boring, dense, and intimidating. This is obviously done to impress other academics and to further careers in academics.
If academics wrote articles that were not none of the above and were possible for a layman to read with a little effort there would be a huge demand for academic papers. Higher demand would enable economies of scale to kick in and would result in substantially lower prices.
By the way, this is already being done with university level lectures. You can download high quality university level courses for $35.95/24 lectures, which means each lecture is about $1.25. Because the professors take pains to not be dryballs and the company only selects non-dryball professors as lecturers they can sell to lots of people and keep the prices low. If academics wrote articles that interested people, but were still of academic quality the prices would come down.
A lot of academic papers aren't well written but a lot are. I think if they were more easily available (and read) that folks would write better.
For physics/math I was thinking of arXiv. It's an amazing resource. They also have a nice feature that keeps track of blog comments on papers.
They've also started putting up conference papers as well.
It's an amazing resource that has really helped physics (IMO).
I think if they were more easily available (and read) that folks would write better. That's putting the cart before the horse.
I think there's less incentive to write well when only a few of ones peers are reading.
Clark,
I am a librarian. Maybe I can help you guys out a bit in regards to online resources.
Most academic libraries these days offer off-campus access to the databases for articles. Most public libraries offer the same services to their databases (but for public libraries, it just depends on what contract they were able to procure with the publishers). What city do you guys live in?
I'm actually just a mile from BYU. I meant to call them and ask their policy for non-students and alumni. Unfortunately I've just been too busy getting caught up on work to do it during the day.
The website for the HBLL says,
Can I access databases from home?
It depends on the database. The majority of databases are available off-campus to current faculty, staff and students using your Net ID and password. To verify off-campus access go to the library home page and click on "Find Articles" and then on "Databases A-Z". Use the legend on the top right of the page to determine availability.
I am not affiliated with BYU. What services may I use?
Most online resources are restricted to BYU students and faculty, but unless you are prompted to enter a BYU NetID and password, you will be able to use them.
You may come to our library in person and use the collections, databases, or electronic sources with very few restrictions.
Of course since all the databases I want do require a password that seems to imply that it's hands off except as a student on campus.
Dan,
Frisco, TX. Just north of Dallas.
I think there's less incentive to write well when only a few of ones peers are reading.
That was my point. Make it so that people other than one's peers can read it. Though I am sure you would disagree, one could argue that recipients of public monies (probably >90% of university faculty) have some responsibility to communicate with those whose money they are spending. They also might make a few bucks in the process from having a wider reading audience.
The argument that it's impossible to do just doesn't fly in most cases.
Clark,
Provo Public Library allows access to databases from home. They use a system that requires a library card (which is free). I recommend you give that a try. Otherwise, the other option is to get a friend who is either a professor at BYU or a student, and ask him to download articles for you. :)
David,
Dallas Public Library has databases available for you off-site, much like Provo's public library. Try them out.
Thanks Dan. It looks like the Sirs Renaissance database is most likely to have philosophy papers. Here's their list of journals. While there are a few philosophy journals, like the Monist, there aren't that many. The EBSCO databases also have few philosophy journals although it's a lot better. (It has all of Oxford's, Routledge's, and Blackwell's journals, for instance)
But I'll try it out when I have time to get down to the Library. I'll report on how it goes.
One of the reasons why journals charge is that their subscriber base is small and paper production costs are high. Charging for articles helps with production costs. A number of neurological journals offer free digital issues once a certain time frame, such as 6 mths or a year, has expired. The ones I object to are the ones who want to charge for articles 10 years old.
One of the things you might do is to write to the journals you are interested in and ask if they will open their digital data base after a certain period of time has expired.
There is a way that sometimes succeeds in obtaining articles journals are asking money for. Look up the webpage of the academic’s who wrote the article. Sometimes they list their articles and provide a free pdf download of the article that the journal is charging for.
Rich
As I had noted in the sidebar there's a particularly egregious case of journals gone rampant suing a blogger for quoting from a journal. This is obviously covered under Fair Use but I think it shows how journals are trying to maintain their last gasps of a monopoly. Personally I think that, outside of the cost of paper issue, journals are typically pretty anti-science in terms of how they view the exchange of ideas.
I'd argue that open information is pretty guaranteed eventually. It's just a question of how long before journals accept it. Many (although not all) are going kicking and screaming. As I've mentioned, physics has already made the transition.
I've closed comments in order to avoid spam since I don't check this older blog as much anymore.
and Theology
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