While Jay Greene and Eduwonkette are
going back and forth about peer-reviewed versus think thank research, I’m wondering how you get your hands on all this great, peer-reviewed research in the first place.
Last week, the journal Nature announced that it was offering researchers the option of making their publications available for free online. This allows people beyond the elite world of academic institutions to gain access to this research - a smart move for researchers who want their work read and utilized beyond the small world of academics who subscribe to these journals. As a field that seeks to provide information to people outside of academia—teachers, school leaders, non-profit organizations—the education research world should be a leader in providing free, online access to academic articles. Instead, much high-quality, peer-reviewed research is locked away in a multitude of expensive journals with little attempt to make the research affordable or easily accessible.
Yesterday, for example, I tried to access an article in a peer-reviewed education research publication. I tried getting the article through an education research database that Education Sector subscribes to—a database that is supposed to provide us with full text articles from this particular journal. But, as it turns out, there is a 12-month delay in getting articles from this journal. In order to get access to the most recent research, I would need to pay $30 for one article, which may or may not provide what I need—I don’t know because I only have the abstract on which to base my purchasing decision.
Note to academia: this is not an effective method for getting people to read or use your research.
I guess I’ll just have to turn to research from another think tank or policy organization—it may not be peer reviewed, but it’s accessible. And in a world with online access to nearly everything, that just may be more important.
5 comments:
Erin,
We're headed in that direction, if slowly. I don't know any colleague who wants to enrich Elsevier at the price of keeping you from reading articles. On the other hand, there are issues of economics (which I know from running a zero-budget open-access journal).
Also, a 6-month or 12-month lag may be frustrating, but it's not an unreasonable compromise to give access while addressing the economics of running a journal. John Willinsky discussed the spectrum of access in his book The Access Principle, and the delayed open access is one option among many.
Stanford just made all their ed research public, not that they're the only source of good research out there, but still...
http://ed.stanford.edu/suse/news-bureau/displayRecord.php?tablename=susenews&id=480
Well said! And shouldn't the institutions and governmental entities sponsoring reseach mandate open access to the work that they fund? Otherwise they are subsidizing the revenues of private publications.
I agree with the information provided above. As an educator, I do not have access to some of the most valued information. It is locked away in expensive journals that we as educators do not have access, even when you have memberships in organization such as ASCD, FASA, etc.
There are some real advantages to making education research more easily and cheaply accessible. BUT education research is under-funded and comparisons to medicine are poorly conceived. Education is more like public health. Is the problem with obesity of young people due to inadequate availability of research findings? I don't think so. Don't expect miracles from education research, free or otherwise.
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