Free (adj./v) Research

The article title almost says it all: “Free Academic Articles Get Read But Don't Generate More Citations” (ScienceDaily). Research has found that a scientific research article made freely available will be read more often than its peers distributed via traditional methods. But it won’t be cited more often. Basically the writers of science research are behaving responsibly with their research; they don’t cite the low-hanging fruit but the best articles for their purpose.

This leads me to wonder when people in the humanities will finally stop killing trees. I have four hard copies of journals staring me in the face as I write this. Of those, three are available online. Though I have the hard copies of these three—all special issues on poets I’m writing about right now—I prefer to use the PDFs I have on my laptop. It’s easier to take notes from them with cut and paste. I can highlight them using the reader software. My computer indexes their contents, so I can search through them if I’ve forgotten the source of a good phrase or citation. But most importantly, they’re always there on my hard drive, and when I work in a coffee shop, at my desk at home, or at my desk at school, I don’t have to worry about not having them.

Yep, I still go to the trouble to dig up the hard-to-find items, but I’m grateful for the electronic copies, and it’s sad that I have to have a university paying for my access to them. Maybe someday that ship will come in.

Another change that I’d like to see: no more of those “books” published for tenure that are a collection of “chapters” that are nothing more than edited versions of articles that have already appeared elsewhere. How, exactly, is that a better use of energy than pursing new writing? Those books are becoming less easy to access than the articles in the journals from which they come.

Maybe instead of acting like a bunch of dinosauria, we could satisfy the publication requirements of tenure based on how often our work is cited, instead of on these collections of recycled journal articles and retreaded dissertations.