Do people outside of universities want to read peer-reviewed journal articles? | adamgdunn

I asked a question on Twitter about whether or not people actually tried to read the peer-reviewed journal articles (not just the media releases), and if they encountered paywalls when they tried. This is what happened ... In case you don’t want to read through the whole conversation, it turns out that every person who answered the question said that they have in the past tried to access peer-reviewed journal articles, and that they have been stopped by paywalls. Some said it happened all the time.  There is very little evidence to show the prevalence of access and blocked access by the 'interested public' for peer-reviewed journal articles. Some people seem to assume that only other scientists (or whatever) would be interested in their work, or that everything the 'public' need to know is contained in a media release or abstract.  I think the results tell us a lot about the consumption of information by the wider community, the importance of scientific communication, the problem with the myth that only scientists want to read scientific articles, and the great need for free and universal access to all published research.  So far, I’ve been collecting whatever evidence I can get my hands on to relate to this question, especially in medicine, and I’ll add these pieces one by one below, just in case you are interested. [1] Open access articles are downloaded and viewed more often than other articles, even when they do not confer a citation advantage. This is seen as evidence that people not participating in publishing are accessing the information. Davis, P.M., Open access, readership, citations: a randomized controlled trial of scientific journal publishing. The FASEB Journal, 2011. 25(7): p. 2129-2134. [2] A Pew Internet Report found that one in four people hit a paywall when searching for health information online. Perhaps more importantly, that 58% of all people have looked for health information online (and in a country where only 81% use the Internet)  http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2013/Health-online/Part-One/Section-9.aspx  [3] Another anecdote was the significant proportion of people accessing PubMed Central from domestic IP addresses – that is, addresses from typical households. These could be academics working from home, of course.  The response to the question was huge with well over 50 retweets (I have fewer than 1000 followers so that’s quite a lot), and the number of responses has been in the order of about 50 so far ..."