Chemistry Central Blog
Unemployed/retired Might Lose Touch with their Fields of Research
I came across a blog posting by Derek Lowe this morning, who, since January 2007, has been looking for a new position. An every day occurrence one might think (redundancy happened to me not so long ago), and not enough to tug on your heart strings. But Derek, with years of expertise in medicinal chemistry and pre-clinical drug discovery, makes a very valid point - now that he is unemployed, how can he access the chemical literature?
For those in Derek's position, keeping up-to-date with research in your field is crucial to helping you back into work. The field he operates in covers many subject areas, and so he has very few options
- struggle to pay personal subscription charges to a huge number of journals, from a variety of publishers
- pay excessive "pay-per-view" charges, of around $30 an article
- visit a library, which increasingly likely doesn't keep a print copy, and where you are unlikely to be able to email yourself a copy of a pdf
- contact each author and hope that they will send you a copy
Of course, this is not just the plight of the unintentionally unemployed. What about those who are retired and either wanting to remain up-to-date, or to offer their significant talents as consultants?
There is some light at the end of this tunnel however. The rise and rise of institutional repositories will certainly help, but they are still difficult to find, often poorly populated and may not contain the "official" version of the manuscript. Thankfully, this is changing.
The other option, as Derek highlights, is to turn to open access journals - and there are a growing number of these in chemistry. Our own broad-ranging Chemistry Central Journal is one of them, there's Geochemical Transactions, and the Beilstein Journal of Organic Chemistry, and Bentham has recently announced that it plans to launch 300 OA journals this year, many of them chemistry based.
We could all be faced with unemployment at any time, and with some luck will make it to retirement - just something else to consider the next time you think about submitting to a closed chemistry journal. Your access now might be fine, your future access could be cut-off!
Posted by Bryan Vickery at 14:09 Comments (1)
Another subset of scientists and researchers with limited access to the scientific literature are those of us in small or start-up companies. With a small oncology company and also a synthetic chemistry contract company, it is imperative that I have access to the literature.
But small companies, like individual scientists, do not have the "deep pockets" necessary to access the needed information. The for-profit journal publishers have effectively barred access to key scientific information except to those who can afford their outrageous fees.
Much of the most innovative work is being done at companies like mine that cannot afford to pay $30+ per paper or pay per-search charges in abstracts or journal collections.
All of my support to open access journals.
Posted by Dr. Terence M. Dolak on June 20, 2007 at 12:52 PM BST #