missed opportunities?
September 9, 2008 – 9:21 pm by calebI was talking to C earlier this evening about the differences between CNN’s website, cnn.com, and the New York Times’ website, nytimes.com. Cnn.com, I explained, both are mostly text with some media, and the difference is that CNN is adding text to their media and the New York Times is adding media to their text.
Scant hours later, she pointed out a sidebar in the article she was reading, “As Barriers Disappear, Some Gender Gaps Widen” that listed articles for “further reading” from external (non-nytimes.com) sources, which seems to amount to scientific articles self-published on the authors’ websites. “Look!”, I’m paraphrasing her, “they’re adding library-like resources too”.
So I don’t know that this is the first time that they’ve done this, and I’ll bet if I poke around the science section I’ll find more. What I’m excited about is the opportunity missed for libraries to have provided this kind of information.
Here is the extra-reading bibliography. I want to find out three things about each article: 1) Is it peer-reviewed? 2) Is its publication at the link nytimes.com lists a copyright violation? 3) Is there a persistent URI for the same article in a library or institutional repository?
“Why Can’t A Man Be More Like A Woman? Sex Differences in Big Five Personality Traits Across 55 Cultures” (pdf). (David Schmitt, Martin Voracek, Anu Realo, Jüri Allik. Jounral of Personal and Social Psychology, 2008.) sic
“More males run fast: A stable sex difference in competitiveness in U.S. distance runners” (pdf). (Robert Deaner. Evolution and Human Behavior, 2006.)
“Gender Differences in Personality Traits Across Cultures: Robust and Surprising Findings”(pdf). (Paul Costa Jr., Antonio Terracciano, Robert McCrae. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2001.)
“A Cross-Cultural Analysis of the Behavior of Women and Men:
Implications for the Origins of Sex Differences”(pdf). (Wendy Wood and Alice Eagly. Psychological Bulletin, 2002.)
I’m going to let everyone play along - please post what you find in the comments if you get to any of them before I do.
5 Responses to “missed opportunities?”
Ok, my first big clue is that three are journals published by the American Pscyhological Association, which I might have guessed if my ILL days weren’t long behind me. The fourth is Elsevier.
All four are copyrighted, according to the PDFs themseves, and I verified in PsycINFO that they are all peer reviewed.
I searched for all four articles by exact title in EBSCO’s version of PsycINFO and do’h! Only two came up as hits (Schmitt et al and Costa Jr did not).
So glad I don’t have to teach this stuff.
I haven’t tracked down persistent URLS yet, though EBSCO’s might work.
By caleb on Sep 9, 2008
From Robert Deaner’s website:
He might have an argument, but “contact the publisher”? Dear Elsevier, I downloaded this article from Professor Deaner’s website and printed 50 copies, how much do I owe you? In that sense I guess it doesn’t matter if you get it from the library or not.
Is it open access, by the authors?
The McAfoose-Wismer site is a wacky, wacky place to find peer-reviewed literature online. Apparently, in Australia, you can be a glamorous model, world traveler, Bob Marley fan and still find time to be a working academic that doesn’t give a hoot about copyright.
By caleb on Sep 10, 2008
Re: Deaner’s papers - Increasingly authors are retaining the right to publish some version of their paper to an institutional repository or personal website. It’s pretty core to the open access movement. So, yeah, I think what you’re seeing there is increasingly typical. I don’t know whether his particular copyright agreements with his publishers have allowed for it but it is likely. I took a quick look at RoMEO (http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo.php?all=yes) for a couple of his publishers and they both had the big a-okay for both pre and post print self-archiving.
By rachel on Sep 10, 2008
Thanks for pointing this out. I definitely wanted to learn more about open access from you and how this fits in.
I also see that one of the APA articles is *not* on an author site.
The bigger questions remains about what it means for libraries to be cut out of the scholarly publishing loop altogether. And then I remember that I keep telling people that this has always been true to an extent.
And then back to my original reaction which was, “I bet they could have linked to libraries”, and eventually leading me to, “can I get a search engine for articles where authors have exercised their open access rights?” doaj might be close - I guess it might be called ‘Google’.
By caleb on Sep 10, 2008
OAIster is not a bad place to start when searching for articles that are OA.
The trouble with linking to persistent identifiers for non-AO articles (via PURLs, DOIs, OpenURLs, etc.) is that there is (AFAIK) not a good mechanism yet that will automatically look up for the user whether he or she has full-text access to the article in the resources of that person’s “home” library (i.e., the one where the user has a library card). This is the “last mile” problem when it comes to the discovery and delivery process. All the tools for doing that kind of automated lookup usually require that the user first set up such systems (via plugins like the OpenURL Referrer, changing set up options on Google Scholar to indicate the link resolver at the user’s home library, etc.) For the foreseeable future, it looks like we’ll have to continue with a hodgepodge of ways to connect readers with content locked away in databases and publisher web sites.
By Stephen Francoeur on Sep 11, 2008