Page 34 - Summer 2015

Reading, Writing, and the ASA
In the real world, the desires listed above are usually imper- fectly realized, and the writer must make some choices and compromises, possibly spending sizable amounts of money in the process. There are also some possible additional de- sires, of a far less altruistic nature, that affect a small minor- ity of writers. Some writers may be ethically challenged, and there are an increasing number of potential writers who are unfamiliar with the ethical norms that have been followed by the majority of writers in the past. This has led to several major scandals that have been reported in the popular press, and there has been an increasing suspicion among readers and the general public regarding the truth of what is being published in the scientific literature and the general level of honesty among those who are engaged in scientific research. Such matters, however, are not discussed in this article.
Desires of Readers
There is a huge variety among readers of scientific and tech- nological works. Some are looking for general knowledge, some for intellectual stimulation, and some for entertain- ment. There are others who are looking for specific knowl- edge, who are seeking to appraise the current state of un- derstanding of a given topic, or who are seeking to obtain an informed perspective on what is the current state of the art and/or on just how the broader community achieved this perspective. Many readers are also researchers and prospec- tive authors who need a very detailed knowledge of a large quantity of literature that pertains to their area of research. Among the possible desires of this broad readership are:(1) a means for acquiring, without an excessive expenditure of time, an acquaintance with the gist of everything that has been written on the topic of their interest; (2) potential ac- cess to any prior written work that any given reader believes to be worth reading; (3) some initial assistance for making a judgment as to the priority and relevance (also the veracity) among those works that have come to the potential reader's attention; and (4) an economically feasible means for access- ing the works that the reader has decided to scrutinize and/ or read in detail.
The last of these has become a major topic of national and in- ternational concern in recent years. The degree of access that a given reader has depends, generally, on the organizations (e.g., libraries) with which the reader is affiliated. The litera- ture has burgeoned enormously, and the potential cost for any given institution having access to all those journals and books that would be of potential interest to any of its affili- ated patrons has become prohibitive. For example, a reader,
during a cursory search using Google Scholar, may become aware of the existence of a potentially useful article in a jour- nal with low circulation and to which his or her university does not subscribe. Or it may be that the subscription does not extend to the year in which the article was published. The publisher maintains a Web site from which the article can be downloaded for a substantial fee. The reader gener- ally will have to pay that fee out of his or her own pocket. The article is short, the authors are unknown to the reader, and the abstracted information is very cryptic. Should or should not the reader pay for the article?
Possibly, the potential reader could ask the reader's institu- tion to secure a copy of the article by interlibrary loan. Ask- ing for such typically involves filling out a very long form, and the fulfillment of the request typically requires a lot of library staff time. Then, again, the reader may have come across a sizable number of potentially desirable articles, each of which requires a large fee to download. To what extent should he or she pester the librarians to fulfill a large num- ber of such requests? Then, when the articles do arrive, they are often in the form of a poor and somewhat illegible pho- tocopy. Was the interlibrary loan process worth the effort?
A related question is whether the original author was aware, at the time the manuscript was submitted, that potential future readers would have such difficulties in accessing the published work. Just what can such an author do, after the fact, to get his or her work to the people who want to read or use it?
A catastrophic problem that readers might encounter in the future is that some desired references may become totally unavailable, the modern equivalent of the apocryphal burn- ing of the Library of Alexandria (for which there is no cur- rent historically accurate account). What could happen is that when a paper is published online by a short-term pub- lisher, the Web site becomes closed down and all the post- ings disappear.
Societal Journals as a Partial Solution
There is a possibility that some of the problems alluded to above could be minimized and some of the desires met if authors chose to submit their scholarly works to journals as- sociated with professional societies. There is no guarantee of this, of course, and there may be some notable exceptions, but, for acoustics at least, JASA would seem to be a relatively safe bet. What I believe to be the most applicable reasons are listed in what follows.
32 | Acoustics Today | Summer 2015