Another "digital divide"

I think I've mentioned before here how different searching for background articles (for research, for grant-writing, for writing up results) is today from how it was when I first started out as an upperclassman undergrad/beginning grad student back in the late 80s/early 90s.

Back then, if you wanted to, say, find background research on Collembolans, you went to big bound books (Biological Abstracts) and looked up your keyword. Then there was a list of article titles (or maybe numeric codes; I know there were something like seven-digit numeric codes involved somewhere but I forget where) that featured your keyword. Then you went to ANOTHER big bound book and looked up each abstract, read it, decided if it was worth the effort to track down the article, and if it was, you either went to the stacks (the system at both Michigan's Botany Library and ISU's library) and found the bound journal on the shelf (and then either read the paper right there and took notes, or, if you felt financially flush, you photocopied it). At some libraries (and for some stuff at ISU), you had to file a special request, either because the stacks were closed to browsers, or, because (at ISU) some of the less-used journals were filed in offsite storage and someone had to go get them.

But now, now we have widespread internet. (The internet, as something more or less widely available to common mortals, was just beginning when I was an upperclassman at Michigan. I remember my first e-mail account - the computers we used were slightly more advanced than the old Zeniths but the screens were still monochromatic type on a solid-color background. Michigan being Michigan, in the lab I used, the screens were blue with yellowish type. And there were no graphics other than the odd little ASCII character pictures that some people made. (For a while, I had an ASCII art picture of Homer Simpson doing one of his "Mmmmm...." lines up next to my desk)

And with the widespread internet, we have article search databases. Of course there's Google Scholar out there, but what I like even better are a couple of subscription-based ones I have access to, thanks to my campus library buying them: BioOne and JSTOR. (JSTOR is actually a database of databases; we just got access to the excellent but pricey database that contains the ecology journals). So now if I want to see what's out there on collembolans, I can just go to one of the data bases, type it in as a keyword, and in less time than it would have taken me to pull the old Biological Abstracts volume off its high shelf (I dropped one on my foot once. Luckily I was wearing fairly stout shoes), I have a long list of potential articles.

And even better, most of them are available to me as .pdf files. (I currently have four folders on my computer desktop for articles, sorted by topic: DAM papers for when I was doing some stuff on human-constructed lakes, COVERED IN BEES for pollinator papers, another folder originally named "Ngangta papers" after the student I was compiling them for (long story but - she had to take my ecology class as an arranged class, so I had her do readings instead. It was a student-visa-about-to-expire issue or I wouldn't have done it). The most recent one, about fire as a management tool is called "Fire! Fire! uh huh huh huh huh"

(You HAVE to have a little fun with this stuff).

Anyway, I can download the papers, store them in my folders, and read them whenever. I'm trying to train myself to read off the screen to save paper, but I still don't like it - it causes some eyestrain and also most journals are still typeset in a two-column-per-page format, which means a lot of needless scrolling back and forth.

But yeah. I regularly tell my beginning ecology students that they have little concept of how much EASIER getting research papers is today.

There is one limitation: some sites have high paywalls, and unless your university pays the subscription fee, you're closed out of any of the publisher's articles (Springer is infamous in scientific circles for this).

But I was also reminded of another difference between "then and now" by an essay in the newest American Scientist. (American Scientist - not to be confused with Scientific American - is the publication of Sigma Xi, a scientific society that generally welcomes cross-disciplinary work and welcomes all sciences into its fold. I'm a member even though there's no local chapter, and I get American Scientist, which is usually pretty interesting, because the articles have a cross-disciplinary way of looking at things)

Henry Petroski, an engineer (and history professor: there's that cross disciplinary-ness) has a regular column in there. I usually enjoy reading it; he writes about things that are of general interest (I think he once did a column on "Galloping Gertie," the bridge that failed).

This month's column was called "In Memory of the Offprint" and made me think of an aspect of scientific publishing or years past that I had largely forgotten (despite the stack of my own early offprints on the corner of my desk). For those unfamiliar with academic publishing, an offprint (or reprint, as I more commonly knew them) was a printed copy of an individual's article, usually stapled, as it appeared in the journal. Typically, journals would send some amount (often 25, sometimes more) to people. The idea was, for other researchers who didn't have access to the journal, they could write to the "corresponding author" and request an offprint.

I remember doing that on occasion. In fact, in my grad-school-orientation class, back around 1990, they  encouraged us all to fill out one of the cards and to write to someone for an offprint. I sent a request to Jessica Gurevitch, a researcher in ecology (most of her work was related to what we might call community assembly). Some weeks later, I got my offprint, which she had signed and written a nice note of encouragement on the top of. That made me happy, and impressed me: this big famous person who gets published in big famous journals actually took a moment to encourage a new grad student!

(Though now, with more experience, I've found that by and large, the people who do good work in their field generally are excellent about encouraging and helping the newbies; it's the people who don't feel secure with their place in the world who are jerks to the newbies. And I've seen that - I've seen people effectively 'dominance mount' a grad student giving his or her first presentation by asking an extremely picky and specific question that doesn't quite pertain to the students' research. Or they ripped into the research using the format of a question. I was raised to praise in public and criticize in private (and I have occasionally taken a student aside to ask them, "Are you aware of this little hole in your research?") and it always felt kind of creepy to me to have someone stand up and blather on for five minutes where the audience knows "They are just trying to rattle this kid, their question really doesn't mean that much." Oh, I've also heard plenty of GOOD questions, questions that made the student stop and think and go "Oh! I see it now!" or say "You know, that would be a really good idea for my next field season" or something.)

Anyway. I wrote off for more reprints from others, when I found an article I wanted to read but that my library didn't have. (Unlike Petroski, I never got put on anyone's mailing list, and I never was privileged to get pre-prints - that is, copies of articles BEFORE they officially came out).

Some years later, when my first paper came out (in 1996. Wow. 18 years ago now. I'm getting old), I got reprint requests myself. They were very flattering to receive: Hey, someone cares enough about my research to ask me for a copy of my paper!

Many of my requests came from the then-newly-democratic Eastern European nations. It was cool to me, as a graduate student (I had earned my Master's then, but was still working on my Ph.D.) to think that someone in Poland or Hungary wanted to read my work. I figured then it was because (a) my work was on strip mine reclamation, and a lot of those nations had had similar environmental damage and (b) it was over using grasslands to reclaim, and most of those areas were historically grassland.

But, based on a comment Petroski made, there may be another reason: in North America and Western Europe (and he doesn't mention it, but presumably Japan), the availability of articles over the internet grew faster than it did in Eastern Europe - he notes that some of his last offprint requests came from Eastern Europe.

(though I will say, the last one I remember getting? Was for the paper based on my doctoral work, and it came from the University of Kentucky. I even kept the request, it's up on my office wall, because it's from someone I think of as a "famous name" in prairie research, so I was impressed by it. Also, Morton Arboretum asked for one for their "permanent reference file.")

I still HAVE a lot of the offprints of my older papers. Whenever I clean my office, I think, "I should save one or two of each for posterity, and recycle the rest. But I can't quite bring myself to do it.

I haven't had offprints in a long while. Many of the papers I've written are available online (some, like the Oklahoma Academy of Science paper, are pretty freely available to any; others are accessible through a database like JSTOR if someone's institution subscribes to it. And yes, I confess: I've searched my own name in BioOne and JSTOR to see what of mine they have).

My current students will probably never use or have offprints. While in some ways it's much nicer to have everything available online, I admit it: I kind of miss the days of offprints a little. Somehow, they seemed "realer" than printing off a .pdf of your article to give to someone or hang up on the departmental "brag board."