Reader ProScience takes me to task in my previous posts for spreading falsehoods and tells me to 'look at the evidence' contained in scientific journals. He makes a good point. I spend a lot of my time looking for scientific journals as part of my research. Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of them are not available for free. Even in the age of the internet it seems that scientific papers, produced in universities and other research centres, actually cost a lot of money to read. Of course, if you work or study in a university, your institution will have a subscription to many of the publishers that charge for these scientific papers so this is not an issue. For the rest of us, access to knowledge, some of it paid for by the public purse, is much harder to come by. Perhaps ProScience or someone else can tell me why institutions don't publish their research online so everyone can benefit from it.
That is a good point Traction Man. Publicly funded research should be publicly available. Well it is an excuse for making money by 'learned' organisations for one thing. If you google 'Directory of Open Access Journals' you'll get a link to free content journals. Sometimes Google Scholar leads you to free articles. If you only get access to articles' abstracts but are interested in reading more, an email to the author will often result in them sending you a copy of the full article.
ReplyDeleteThank you. That's really helpful.
ReplyDeleteI don't know if it is the case in the UK, but university libraries here in Oz are open to anyone (though only student/staff/faculty may borrow). If you know the type of article you're looking for, many have their catalogues available to search online.
ReplyDeleteI work in a university, happy to send you PDF of any article you want. You can check online for the citation and let me know then.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the tips. I do feel that universities could do much more to open up to the public and private study. I'm a firm believer in lifelong learning. The Internet is a great resource and could be even better with more public access to scientific papers, works of art and historical documents.
ReplyDeleteYou can get access to some articles from Google Scholar. (My counsellor put me on to this, as I do lots of research for the various conditions in our family. DH still not fully diagnosed, DD just starting diagnosis.)
ReplyDeletehttp://scholar.google.co.uk/intl/en/scholar/about.html
I have found that medical research articles seem to be among the hardest to obtain. I can usually view the abstract and nothing else without paying a fortune to join some site or another.
ReplyDeleteThanks also for the tips people :)
You're so right, Kosmos. I'm still trying to get to the root cause of my osteomyelitis. There are many papers and studies but they all cost around £30 a time to get past the abstract. I imagine that much of this research has been carried out in public hospitals. The research should be available to all. I don't understand why these papers can't be made freely available online. How is knowledge supposed to flourish if some people keep it under lock and key?
ReplyDeletehere's a list of medical journals that are free:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.freemedicaljournals.com/
If you haven't had access to these journals previously, what have you based your arguments on, particularly where you dispute the link between high salt intake and high blood pressure?
ReplyDeleteNot all journals are unavailable. There is a fair bit of research in the public domain on salt intake. I also have fairly large network of friends working in medicine and I listen to their views on the issue of salt. Do the research yourself and see what you think.
ReplyDeleteThere's an underlying issue here about how trustworthy scientific research is. Global warming is but one aspect. I'm not sure we can trust science in the same way as we used to. The power of money from government, big business and other vested interests has polluted science. I used to respect and believe scientists; then they started contradicting one another. It started back in the late 1960s with the butter v margarine debate. Not a day goes by without some scare report saying this is bad for you or that is bad for you. Then someone contradicts it. The result is that the public is learning to take surveys and scientific research with a large pinch of salt. Scientists have only themselves to blame. They have sold out in the pursuit of funding. Perhaps we have too many scientists.