Summary: This post is a meditation on the consequences to the public of academic journals charging very high fees for access to research. Includes references to Ezra Klein on gated political-science research and examples from me on gated human-sexuality research. —fl

So just yesterday I was reading another mostly-methane science-news “report” full of the reporter’s speculations about how this or that “makes sense because…” evolution something hunter gatherers something else that all sounded a lot like Betty Draper in a bearskin with a reed basket.

And so as I often do I started researching the actual scientist’s work and… it sounded pretty promising, and it actually didn’t seem to have much at all to do with primitive ancestry, or excruciatingly gendered behavior wired into our genes, but instead regular cognitive science on thousands of contemporary humans. And I thought pretty cool, I’d like to read about it and…

There’s the for-profit academic journal online. And the title and a one-paragraph abstract of the paper. And titles and abstracts of two other papers by the same author that look tangentially related but interesting in their own right. And just to look briefly at each one of them to see if I want to read more I’d have to… cough up $35.00 per article.

Consequently. Well, consequently I just tucked my children into bed, kissed my sweetie good night, locked the doors, turned out the lights, and went to bed instead.

Fortunately I woke up this morning to see Ezra Klein’s summary of political scientist Seth Masket’s persuasive argument about how academic political science, which is widely dismissed in Washington D.C., ought to have more relevance. Klein’s take:

[P]olitical scientists make it extremely hard for the rest of us to benefit from all that study. The papers are locked away in obscure journals accessible only by expensive subscriptions. There are relatively few blogs dedicated to applying the insights of political science to the events of the day (but more than there used to be!). I don’t know of any organizations in the District dedicated to guiding journalists through the thickets of the discipline. Nor do many think tanks in Washington employ political scientists (one reason that economists are so dominant in this town is that they’re everywhere, and they spend most of their time talking to journalists on the phone).

I really like the papers I’ve come across from Yale’s David Mayhew. Brilliant, careful stuff that’s vastly enriched my understanding of Congress. But I’ve only read them because another political scientist thought to send them to me. And there’s no obvious way for me to get more of them without badgering people for things that I don’t yet know that I want. Similarly, Frances Lee’s publisher recently sent me her book ‘Beyond Ideology.’ Great stuff, and it led to this post. But I never would’ve found out about it if it hadn’t shown up on my doorstep.

Masket is right that journalists are making a terrible error if they judge political scientists irrelevant to the debate. But political science could do a lot more to meet those of us who want to listen halfway.

He said it here.

You’ll note that Klein isn’t complaining about how hard life is for him because he can’t easily or inexpensively access academic papers than I’m complaining that (for instance) I’d have to squander $34.00 to see whether, say, Lucia F. O’Sullivan and colleagues’ A Cognitive Analysis of College Students’ Explanations for Engaging in Unprotected Sexual Intercourse from the journal “Archives of Sexual Behavior” contained helpful insights for a post on sex safety. It just means I’m not going to bother.

Or, worse, if I was on assignment and working on deadline I might just grab the university’s press release on their paper, throw something in about primitive Don Drapers hunting giraffes, and call it a day.

My gain. The researcher’s loss. The public’s loss. End of story.

Oh, another good real-world example I just stumbled across a few minutes ago (ok, ok, I often have 10 things going on all at once.)

One item in a link roundup from Em & Lo says

A study finds that some women may have lower sex drives because they experience guilty feelings about being sexually aroused. If you thought libido was a tough problem to fix, try guilt…

Read the quote in context here.

If you follow that link to the New York Daily News the reporter writes…

“Self-reported sexual arousal is subject to impression management – as in the greater reluctance among women high in sex guilt to report feeling sexually aroused,” the report reads. In other words, women with lots of guilty feelings about sex may not admit to feeling aroused, or may even convince themselves that they aren’t.

You can read that here.

So you go look for the original research and discover (somewhat by coincidence) that it too is published in the journal “Archives of Sexual Behavior” and will therefore (once the for-profit umbrella publisher, Springerlink Netherlands, gets around to putting it online) cost roughly $35.00 to read. Unless your employer or library pays the $35.00 for you, making it “free” the same way your phone calls, copier, and administrative assistant is “free.” For you.

But, since the paper itself isn’t yet available to the general public you go searching for other interviews with the author or principle investigator, Meredith Chivers, and discover an interactive Q&A with the author hosted by the Globe and Mail from around the time the paper was being prepared. Reading Chivers’ replies to sometimes very specific questions you learn that rather than drilling down on women and guilt Chevers very carefully says very general things like

Women have different experiences of societal constraints on their sexuality, depending on many factors such as culture, religion, and geographical location.

and

...there are many factors that are likely to influence women’s sexual response.

My research has examined only a small number of these factors in the laboratory and I plan study others using other methods of investigation as I continue my program of research.

Oh! Gold mine! Chivers concludes her conversation with something I wish I’d seen when I started.

I am grateful to The Globe and Mail for this opportunity to educate women and men, and to have a dialogue about sexuality with readers.

I would encourage interested readers to obtain the actual research papers themselves for more specific information about this and other research.

Media coverage of research is rarely able to provide a high degree of resolution on any topic because of factors such as space limitations, and readers should be aware that they receive only very limited information on any topic if they do not read the primary sources themselves.

I don’t know what the Globe and Mail’s circulation is and so I don’t know how many people read her interview. I do know that between direct visits and RSS/Newsreader subscriptions roughly 3,000 people will read this post… or at least see it. If we all wanted to take her advice that would be… um… let’s see, $35.00 times 3,000 readers, carry the 1… $105,000.00 dollars for the publisher, Springerlink Netherlands. Exactly zero dollars of which would go to Dr. Chivers by the way.

With the result that, well, exactly none of the general public is going to see it. Nor are any media people who might want to report on her work to the general public. Nor are any responsible bloggers like Em & Lo (or me) who are going to cross-post in good faith about it.

And with the further result that headlines are going to mostly say stuff like “Women may have lower sex drives due to guilty feelings about being aroused, study says”, for instance. (And, as in anonymous example that set me off last night, eternal speculation about immutable gender traits based on what reporters remember from the movie One Million Years B.C.)

And no one but Chiver’s colleagues and the occasional random university student with library access is going to know whether that was the main point of her study (unlikely) or a juicy-looking footnote.

One last thing? Trust me, if the Washington Post isn’t giving its reporters paid access to academic research then no other reporters are getting it either. Just saying.