Re: problem of the Ginsparg Archive as self-archiving model

From: David Goodman <dgoodman_at_PHOENIX.PRINCETON.EDU>
Date: Tue, 5 Sep 2000 13:37:21 -0400

High public use has always been true in the biomedical sciences, and I'm
glad to have it confirmed by a colleague from the physical sciences.

The percentage of the general public with scientific literacy may be
tragically low, but the absolute numbers aren't-- I suspect they may be
more than the professionals.

One of the problems of the web in biomedicine has been the extremely large
amount of erroneous material out there, and anything we can do for the
wider and easier dissemination of real research will be of
immediate public benefit in the most direct possible way.

 David Goodman, Princeton University Biology Library
dgoodman_at_princeton.edu 609-258-3235

On Tue, 5 Sep 2000, Undetermined origin c/o LISTSERV administrator wrote:

>
> 2.
> "Andrew Odlyzko" wrote:
> >
> > > That will be
> > > outweighed by the gains for scholars and the general public, but
> > > those large gains will be spread much more thinly. As a result
> > > there are few people with a large interest in pushing for a rapid
> > > change.
> >
> > I disagree. Refereed journals are neither written for nor read by the
> > general public. They are written by researchers, for researchers. And
> > researchers are the ones who would gain from the freeing
> > of this literature. (The public too would gain, but only indirectly, as
> > its benefits from scholarship/science always are.)
> >
> > Well, that is another point where we disagree. Yes, you are right,
> > refereed journals are written by researchers, for researchers. But
> > I think that is changing, in two ways:
> >
> > (i) There is increasing pressure for more interdisciplinary work,
> > which forces narrow specialties to try to make their communications
> > understandable to wider (although still scholarly) groups.
> >
> > and
> >
> > (ii) There is latent interest in research results by the general
> > public, interest that is stimulated by easy location and access
> > to that information. Here is a quote from "The rapid evolution
> > of scholarly communication":
>
> Both have been our experience. One surprise for me with our late (not so
> lamented) eprint archive was that we actually got a substantial number
> of referrals from a reference in USA Today...
>
> Arthur
>
> --
> Arthur P. Smith email: apsmith_at_aps.org
> Manager, Database Group The American Physical Society
> 1 Research Rd. Box 9000, Ridge, NY 11961-9000 phone: +1-631-591-4072
>
Received on Mon Jan 24 2000 - 19:17:43 GMT