The Article and My Intellectual Socialist View.
Call me a cheap bastard or an intellectual socialist, but I can’t seem to swallow the idea that I should be paying to read a research paper that was so prominently marketed to news agencies from a university study. After reading Seth’s post the other day on a story about a study entitled, “Attention web designers: You have 50 milliseconds to make a good first impression!” I went on a small scale crusade to find out more about the actual study.
There is evidence of reports on the study abound but you would think that a university study would be available to anyone who wanted it for free.
It may be naive of me to think that a Canadian researcher working at a Canadian University (Carleton) would be beholden (to a small extent) to the taxpayer here since universities in Canada are so heavily subsidized by the Government. So why is a study from a Canadian research group available only through a paid subscription to the journal Behaviour & Information Technology, in which it was published or on a per article website for $35USD.
So no luck on open research and I remain empty handed. I guess I will just wait until it falls from the sky.
January 19th, 2006 at 9:00 pm
In the Web environment in which we both work, we can find much free information about how to code Web pages, how to design Web sites and about usability and information architecture techniques. It does seem strange to us that someone would come up with useful information that is, to a certain degree witheld from us. Although some of the article (I saw it too but haven’t read it) is freely available for us to read, other information about his research appears hidden (unless you pay). This is not entirely without precedent: a significant amount of Jakob Nielsen’s publications are not available free.
I am not quite sure where I sit with this: the journal must be able to survive so paying for the publication, or even the article, doesn’t seem unfair. From what you have written, it appears that at least some of the results are available free and if a person is just interested in the results and not the methodology, that may be sufficient. It might be that the results that you and I are most interested in are only part of the results of his study. If we are not interested in the methodology or behavioural psychology behind the results, it may not be of any value to us to purchase the article: other researchers may have a different point of view.
I can’t agree with any suggestion that tax-supported Canadian universities should provide the publication for free: there are many people outside of Canada who don’t pay Canadian taxes yet would have access to these publications. There could be no viable means of ensuring only Canadians accessed this content for free.
January 19th, 2006 at 9:35 pm
Jules, thanks for dropping in again,
I agree with most of what you said. I was merely bitching in the guise of debate. Really, I feel that the journal must get paid by its readership and not some special interest group or advertiser for the research to have true validity.
My main criticism is that I don’t understand how so many media outlets have run with the findings based on published conclusion statements and providing no clear analysis of the report/article itself and hence my search for the article. I want to learn how they got to those conclusions.