Getting access to research literature
By Gillian Kerr, RealWorld Systems
The information in this article is current as of March 4, 2004.
There are significant barriers between research and practice in the human services. Researchers don't publish in journals that practitioners and policy-makers actually read, and practitioners can't afford to get access to relevant articles when they are published. Social programs are not being designed or managed based on relevant information from research findings, which means that social services are probably much less effective than they could be.
There are several reasons for this gap between researchers, practitioners and policy-makers. I'm going to talk about one of them the difficulties in getting access to high quality research papers with relevance to human services, and a suggested approach to the problem.
Nonprofit agencies without a formal affiliation with a university are rarely
equipped to find and get relevant articles at a reasonable cost. They can
send a staff person to a nearby university library, where they can generally
use public terminals to print out articles of interest, but they won't be
able to save the articles on disk or legitimately distribute them to colleagues.
If they don't have access to a university, they can buy research subscriptions
to online services like Ingenta, which
typically charges over $30 US per article, or Questia,
which charges $20 US/month per user for a small subset of journals.
Access to the academic literature, for most human service practitioners, is through conferences or summarized articles in professional journals or public media (e.g., business magazines). Very few organizations can afford to do a systematic, or even brief and cursory, literature review.
(I am assuming here, by the way, that many organizations are developing the internal capacity to read and understand research literature. Any agency that is investing in program evaluation will have some staff who are able to do literature reviews if they had access to the literature.)
Without access to research on human services, how can service models improve, and how can we provide more effective programs? We must figure out how to get easier, cheaper access to relevant, high quality and practical research literature.
Access to academic research papers is a big issue in universities also, not only for human services. Most research journals are expensive to buy, even for institutions. Most university libraries are cutting back on their journal subscriptions to save money. Furthermore, printed journals take a long time to produce and distribute compared to the speed of communication that scientists use to share information with their peers. This drives researchers nuts. Researchers themselves write and submit their papers to journals without payment; their salaries are covered by the organizations they work for. The papers are reviewed by academic peers, also without any additional payment. Almost all academic research is freely produced and reviewed as a contribution to the field. The big, expensive, established scientific journals are dealing with a massive and growing backlash against their expense and inaccessibility.
The Challenge of Finding Relevant Research
Academic researchers communicate with each other through publishing their research
in scientific journals. There are many thousands of journals, and no-one can
keep up with all of the articles being churned out every month. For individual
researchers, the main ways to keep up with the literature are by monitoring
a few of the key journals in their particular area of research, and by doing
occasional searches for relevant keywords in the citation indexes. For example,
if you were interested in keeping up with the latest research in psychological
services, you might subscribe to Psychological
Bulletin (at a cost of almost $300/year Canadian for an individual if
you didn't work in a university). However, if you were interested in a specific
topic, such as effective ways to work with violent families, you would have
to look in all of the relevant literature, not just one journal. To do this
most efficiently, you would search one or more of the citation indexes that
cover the key journals in your field. In the case of most human services, that
would be the Social
Sciences Citation Index (SSCI), which covers about 1,700 of the major journals
in the social sciences. Indexes overlap; for example, the Psychological Bulletin
is covered by 17
different indexes, including the SSCI. That means that 17 different services
have collected the abstracts and article summaries for all of the articles in
Psychological Bulletin. Most people focus on one or two indexes for all of their
research needs.
The problem with the SSCI is that it leaves out many of the journals that your audience may actually read. Canadian journals are poorly represented, for example, and new online journals are almost completely absent. 1,700 journals sounds like a lot, but it's a small percentage of the journals that are out there. And you can't search the SSCI unless you are affiliated with a university or a research institution.
Open Access Journals
Open Access journals are part of a growing movement in academia. Open access journals
are published on the web, and are completely free to readers. They are funded
by institutions, advertisers or the researchers themselves. The best journals
are peer reviewed, have prominent editorial boards, and aim to be of the same
quality as the best subscription-based journals. Research
is showing that open access journals are read more often than fee-based
journals, so they will continue getting more popular.
The Directory of Open Access Journals lists
almost 800 journals, with dozens being added monthly, including Health
Policy Research and Systems, the Canadian
Journal of Educational Administration and Policy, and Public
Administration & Management. All of the journals in the directory have
some form of quality control, mostly peer review.
Unfortunately, most of these journals are not listed in the main academic research sources (such as the Social Sciences Citation Index). That means that the articles would be essentially invisible to the academic community, because they can't be searched efficiently. As a result, these journals are not yet recognized as having a great deal of impact in the scientific world.
This is changing fast. A new framework called the Open
Archives Initiative (OAI) provides a common web language to enable all of
the open access journals to be searched, just like the regular citation indexes.
The computer science field is being transformed first, using clever but complicated
services like CiteSeer (see this
example of a list of the most highly cited open access articles on collaboration),
since computer scientists live on the internet and can't stand being restricted
to paper journals and they have the skills to take matters into their own
hands. Their innovations are being picked up by other fields, such as education
and medicine (see the PubMed
citation index). So far the open access alternatives are small and fairly primitive.
Given the frustration of researchers and the intense pressure for open information,
this situation won't last. But for the next few years, there will be confusion
as researchers decide whether to use the expensive old research resources or
the new open access ones.
In the meantime, researchers who want to communicate with the nonprofit sector might consider publishing either in one of the open access journals, or self-archiving.
Institutional Repositories and Self-Archiving
Another way to make research articles accessible is through archiving articles
online in institutional
repositories that are maintained by universities and other organizations.
The University of Toronto has just launched a massive institutional archive
called D-Space
that will allow all faculty members to publish their articles using permanent
web addresses (or "persistent URLs", as they are called by librarians). Persistent
URLs enable researchers to reference online articles in their research; most
web sites keep changing, and without persistent URLS and official archives,
reference lists can be out of date even before the article is published.
The open access movement is encouraging researchers to self-archive
all of their articles, including the ones that are published in subscription
journals. If the archives are consistent with the Open Archive Initiative framework,
they can be keyword searched. Eventually, there will be hundreds of thousands
of articles on open archives, all searchable.
Supporters of the Open Archive movement recommend that all researchers either publish in open access journals, or self-archive the research that is published in subscription journals, so that all new research is accessible.
Most of the software for institutional repositories is open source (D-Space
and EPrints being two of the
leaders). It would be possible for the nonprofit sector to develop its own institutional
repository that would be accessible to the entire sector. The Canadian Centre
for Philanthropy's nonprofitscan.ca
portal would be a good candidate. Research would then be accessible to the entire
international academic community, and international research would be accessible
to the users of the portal.
Conclusions
There's some serious work to be done in the nonprofit sector around access to research that will improve our services. One approach might be to increase the use of open access journals in publishing and sharing research in the sector. Another approach, which would be complementary to the first, would be to develop a sector-wide institutional repository to make research easier to find and distribute.
An institutional repository for the sector could have enormous impact in promoting the capacity of nonprofit organizations to tap into the scientific literature, while also making it easier for academics to communicate with practitioners.
**********
Gillian Kerr, Ph.D., C.Psych.
President, RealWorld Systems
gkerr at realworldsystems.net
Read my weblog at http://blog.realworldsystems.net
