Knight Library is a truly invaluable information resource. Databases like EBSCO and LexisNexis provide access to hundreds of thousands of documents that simply cannot be found elsewhere on the Internet. Sure, Google is great when you’re looking for UFO conspiracy theories and pornography, but unless you’re lucky enough to be writing your doctoral thesis on either of those topics, you’ll probably need to search for information somewhere more reputable.
Unfortunately, Knight Library is planning to cut several scholarly journals and nearly 30 databases, limiting the research options available. Officials have given various reasons for the cutbacks in service – subscription prices are growing while the library budget is not, for-profit publishers who maintain some of these services make a lot of money while the authors themselves make none, and there is a desire to proceed toward new forms of research that is mutually beneficial to both authors and the school – but the fact remains that once these journals and databases are gone, there will be fewer avenues of research open to students completing their scholarly projects. Some of the smaller databases on the chopping block, like Nucleic Acids Abstracts, may not be vital to a large percentage of the student body (although I will sorely miss this opportunity to know about the thousands of kinds of nucleic acids in the world, or even to find out what a nucleic acid is), but others, such as the LexisNexis Government Periodicals Index, could have a greater effect on student research.
The proposed alternative to these databases and journals is open source publishing, a form of Internet distribution wherein scholars publish their studies online and everyone has free and unrestricted access. Sites like archive.org are host to hundreds of thousands of articles, videos, images, books and archived Web pages, all available for free download. Eager to see if this Wikipedia-style approach to research was all it has cracked up to be, I swung by archive.org and took a look around.
The Web site describes itself as a digital equivalent to the ancient Library of Alexandria, which was said to include a copy of every book in the world at that time before it burned down (one would think with all that accumulated knowledge they would have at least figured out how to install a sprinkler system). When I visited, archive.org’s front page indicated its intent to archive just about anything by displaying its most recent acquisitions, which included a recording of a Grateful Dead concert, a novel published in 1892 and a documentary about the Los Angeles Fire Department from the early 1950s (exactly the sort of thing the Library of Alexandria needed).
However, when I entered my Info Hell topic, “Prison Reform,” into the search bar, I was presented with 71 results. Several of them were historical documents, a few digitized books, a B-movie from 1943 called “Prison Mutiny” and two audio clips from a right-wing talk radio show whose topics frequently include 9/11 conspiracy theories and the illegal immigrant “invasion” of our country. I didn’t find any contemporary academic sources whatsoever. Of course, I could have been looking on the wrong site. The problem is, I spent an hour searching for open source sites on the Internet, and archive.org was the best result I found – if we’re switching to a new source for research, I’d want it to be more accessible than that.
I think the concept of freely available information is very sound – this is one of the reasons I can spend hours fiddling around on Wikipedia. And I’m definitely in favor of the University making the shift to open source publishing of this sort. But to make that shift now by canceling our subscriptions to more traditional services is preemptive and shortsighted.
Open-source publishing is only as good as the people participating, and at the moment the trend is only gathering steam. The open source database I looked at was home to exercise videos and a 45-page stage play about ants, but no scholarly articles on corrections, which is a commonly picked topic by students in Information Gathering. To cancel our subscriptions to traditional databases and journals before open source Web sites develop a broader range of useful scholarly information will leave a lot of students in the lurch as far as research is concerned.
Giving students a few more years with ready access to reliable information allows sites like archive.org some time to develop their range of scholarly articles. While sitting and waiting for open source publishing to really take off may not seem like a wise idea at first, the University could hasten the process along by setting aside some funds for the development of the open source model. By offering incentives to professors who post their studies online rather than submitting them to journals or helping to spread the word in the academic community about these digital alternatives, we could work to increase the number of scholarly documents available online in order to make the transition smoother when the time comes to change our methods of research.
Sure, the idea of spending money on what is supposed to be a more cost-effective strategy seems counter-intuitive, but if we really want to embrace a publication model that is free for everyone, we’ve got to make an investment in our future.
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