Communicating *Science*

Kent Anderson in the Society for Scholarly Publishing's blog, The Scholarly Kitchen, writes quite passionately about how publishers (and librarians!), in focusing on the practice of scholarly publishing, may be neglecting its purpose. 

Have We Forgotten Readers in Our Worries Over Access?

POSTED BY KENT ANDERSON ⋅ AUG 13, 2013

I’ve been reading surveys of physicians and attending focus groups filled with physicians for more than 20 years. If there’s one clear trend, it’s that science is becoming less important in the daily lives of practicing physicians. It seems to me that they are less likely to be aspiring scientists and seem more attuned to merely surviving the daily grind — paperwork, administrative duties, and patients. They don’t even bother to posture about their academic aspirations anymore. Everyone seems to be feeling burned out and hustled.

Physicians have always struck me as the great translators of science into practice — biomedicine in action — so it’s a bit alarming to observe the persistent erosion of their identification with science.
They do still pay attention to the scientific literature, but increasingly through the smaller eyepiece of the major journal brands — the New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, the Lancet, and maybe one major specialist journal. Beyond this, the impression one gets is that science has become unapproachable for them.

... 

Perhaps it’s merely a coincidence, but three trends have occurred coincident with the bifurcation of physician practice and physician science, at least as I hypothesize it:

• open access (OA) and its emphasis on the article economy
• the replacement of personal subscriptions with institutional access
• the disappearance of print

Each of these has contributed to an overall gestalt — science has become abstracted away from practitioners. It has disappeared from the tangible world as journals have disappeared from tables, desks, and waiting rooms. It now lives in the cloud, where it is unmanageable except through search engines, maybe. It has disappeared from professional economies, as library budgets have superseded department, group, or individual spending. And it has become a producer-side commodity, something less helpful to readers even as it has become more tractable for authors.

It’s fascinating to watch physicians talk about how science is less and less important to their daily lives. This is going on while we constantly debate how to publish more science. After all, more papers without a paywall after publication should increase interest in science, right?

We tend to forget that water can be fatal in too high a dose. There is “too much” of anything.

We’re so fixated on citations, OA, APCs, embargoes, and all the other ephemera we debate too long and too often that it’s easy to forget the purpose. It’s not to strut our stuff, it’s not show how morally superior one faction is against another, and it’s not to win some sort of Pyrrhic intramural victory. We have readers, and while it’s convenient and even easier to serve authors, ultimately we serve readers. Even our authors agree on that fact.

Full post at link; I encourage you to read it.