We still hear from librarians that they build their journal collection based on researcher need & that researcher recommendation is a key factor in decision-making for new purchase and cancellation. I suspect this recommendation system may be less than robust in many instituions. When I ask a librarian when they last saw a request they find it hard to remember.

And when you reveiew usage of the “chosen” journals, you get a sense of how hard it is to predict all needs.

It would be great to get a sense of the scale of P2P sharing in well-resourced universities and how likely it is that a user alerts their library to their journal needs when getting hold of what you want quickly and easily via sharing is the reality. And when the libarry is making cuts.

We should not stop sharing, but we could be more knowledgable about the mechanics of title selection and how it can be improved if we dig a bit deeper.

http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/274-guid.html

Life is short, and can be reckoned in terms of keystrokes.

One deposit in your institutional repository is a few keystrokes.

For 63% of articles, one more keystroke makes your deposit Open Access (OA), with the publisher’s blessing, and users need nearly click once to access.

http://romeo.eprints.org/stats.php

For the remaining 37%, set access as “Closed Access” (one keystroke), and the Button will provide “Almost-OA” semi-automatically during the embargo: A few keystrokes for the user and one keystroke for the author.

And once 63% is OA and 37% is almost-OA, the embargo dominoes will soon fall under author/user pressure for more OA, and 100% will be accessible via OA (one keystroke)

For a while my university didn’t even have access to Science or Nature… so I relied heavily on such strategies.

As a result, we don’t see the kind of domestic piracy culture in journal publishing, at least nothing like what the music and film industries deal with. (Although one hears about serious abuse of licensed access via stolen credentials in some Asian countries, where what we might call theft is viewed more as “creative acquisition” and widely practiced. That’s very different from polite sharing.)

Still, Gaule reports that Indian reference lists are shorter than Swiss lists which tells me that the time and effort that goes into asking authors and colleagues has a real quantifiable effect.

One would expect, however, that this citation effect would be diminishing over time as the sharing becomes easier and faster.

P2P article sharing has been the norm for decades – recall the pre-internet reprint exchange system. I don’t imagine US scientists are very shy about asking their colleagues for PDFs of articles whenever the need arises. If you know your colleague is in town, it’s gotta be faster than ILL.

There is a culture of sharing in academe that transcends money-grubbing I-subscribe-you-don’t attitudes. And it’s not only the “have nots” doing the asking either. Since no library can have it all, even Harvard’s scholars are probably going to ask for an article now and then.