The Clear Literature
Monday February 25, 2008
When it comes to learning about current geology, the intelligent public has had two long-standing avenues of information, the open literature and the gray literature. But on the Web, the open literature is closed while the gray literature is open. And a third channel is growing more and more influential, one I call the clear literature. My textbook examples are arXiv.org and the mantleplumes.org site, places where working scientists present their undiluted work. They aren't blogs because there are no comments; they aren't wikis because each piece of content has its own distinct author. They're open spaces for a selected set of authoritative sources, something between the formally edited journal and the freeform expression that any of us can do on our own sites.
Comments
I understand your point, but I feel that this ‘clear’ literature is closer to grey; it can still be very blog-like and biased. My best example is snowballearth.org, a highly problimatic site in my view that gives little contrasting argument and peer-review opportunity.
That’s fair to point out (except that gray lit as I described it is in no way “blog-like and biased”). But bias exists in the open literature too. I think that the benefits of the clear literature outweigh the risk of a few sites that are overly fond of their thesis.
There are more and more open-access peer-reviewed journals, plus as Harvard did recently institutions are beginning to require open access to publications by their employees.
All of the open-access journals are listed here.
In the earth science area, the EGU in particular has a growing number of such journals.
U.S. government scientists don’t have to worry about copyright, but availability is variable since it’s up to individual institutions to get the papers posted. NASA GISS (mainly climate research) is one that does a good job (pubs page here).
And finally, many individual scientists make a habit of putting copies of their papers on their web sites.
Re arXive, in my experience the lack of peer review makes for an uneven quality.
As an amateur, I’ve always found it difficult that I could only get the good information by subscribing to a journal or buy expensive packages of downloads from a journal. I can’t afford that, so I can’t read those articles. Is that what you mean by the “Open” literature being “closed”?
How can the ordinary citizen check up on our scientists if they make us pay big money for their information?
Benton, I don’t recall the details but there’s been talk in Congress of requiring that all U.S. government-funded papers be open-access. Depending on how they define it, that could cover nearly everything. You can google on this and then get in touch with your Congressional reps.
One concern is the impact on the AGU, and I assume they must have something to say about this.