Re: Pricing of Journals

On Wed, 20 Jan 1999, Albert Henderson <noblestation[_at_]compuserve.com> opined:
>
> Your Ford analysis is inappropriate. Undergraduate students, who
> dominate higher education populations do very well without the
> huge collections found at research universities. On the other
> hand, postgraduate research is likely to fail if its relatively
> few researchers lack information.

Mr. Henderson, you've just revealed your complete lack of knowledge about how research is actually performed at research universities.

(1) Research groups, particularly in the life sciences, generally include several undergraduate students who work as laboratory assistants. These undergraduates are expected to become familiar with the current literature concerning the research area. Granted, such familiarity is not as broad-reaching as that expected of a doctoral candidate. I speak from personal experience here.

(2) A significant part of junior- and senior-level courses at the leading research universities--which frequently have those big undergraduate student bodies you denigrated--requires literature reviews in narrow areas. For example, there was a "paper" requirement in every department in the College of Arts and Sciences at my undergraduate institution--all departments imposed a research paper, requiring access to current scholarly journals, on a required junior or senior course (except the English and French departments, which did it for essentially all of the courses!).

(3) Aside from the independent research issue, a significant number of instructors use articles in their daily teaching. If you're so concerned about the research base in this country, you must also be concerned about the currency of skills of undergraduates. One can make an argument that one of the (many) causes for the steadily increasing time-to-doctorate is having to fill the gap between undergraduate teaching at too many schools and current theory. It's particularly apparent in the humanities.

(4) Finally, there are more than a "relatively few researchers" at any research institution. There are all of those graduate students; the undergraduates mentioned in point 1 above; the professional staff whose names often get relegated to the acknowledgment footnote, but are nonetheless involved in the research; postdoctoral fellows; adjuncts; etc. Specific example: the institution I attended as an undergraduate had about 125 biology majors in each year (virtually all of whom did research work as seniors, and the majority as juniors), about 140 to 160 graduate students, about 25 post-docs, and 29 faculty members in the department. Then there was a professional staff of about 25, whose work ranged from animal care to experimental design. By any reasonable definition, these are all researchers. If your definition of "researcher" includes only the faculty members, maybe--probably not, but maybe--some of your conclusions are valid. But that doesn't reflect reality.

I'm not going to bother with the rest of your nonresponsive reply.

C.E. Petit, Esq.
<cepetit[_at_]usa.net>

"This is not fine prose nor, by itself, terribly clear. It would appear to have been drafted by lawyers."

Bourke v. Dun & Bradstreet, No. 98-1163 (7th Cir. Oct. 27, 1998) (Cummings, J.) Received on Fri Jan 22 1999 - 14:57:38 GMT