While working on a literature review, I discovered the American Psychological Association (APA) is the sponsor of one of the databases of sources I've been using for finding scholarly journal articles. PsycINFO is one of the only search EBSCO searches I've been using that has an option to select a limiter of "Peer Reviewed". Sometime in the last month, the http://library.ucf.edu/ gateway started offering PsycARTICLES. I thought it was great to have another option from a similar source, but PsycARTICLES does not have an option to limit results to scholarly articles. At first I thought since I didn’t have the option, there was no way to find out what articles are peer reviewed or not, but then it occurred to me perhaps only scholarly articles were listed in the database in the first place. I have still not yet found a place to explicitly say what the peer reviewed composition of PsycARTICLES is, but I have discovered it has been a reliable place to find full-text HTML and PDF versions of articles and it does not have articles dating before 1985. I've often thought if something isn’t interesting enough to be discussed in a 20-year timespan of publications, then I need not be concerned about it at this point in my research.

I read an article on the internet about The Royal Society having a problem with research published with "open access", referring to articles online. Their concern is the demise of journals published by not-for-profit societies. The question posed at the end of the article is, "Why would you pay to subscribe to a journal if the papers appear free of charge?"

I had two reactions to The Royal Society. First was the payment. I read articles from online non-scholarly journals which are supported by subscriptions. The articles are sold in PDF format and can be downloaded as soon as an issue or subscription is paid for. After a few months, when the topics are old news, the subscriber-only content is made available online to the general public. The old issues serve as examples of what type of content potential future subscribers should expect to see. Anyone who wants a print version can just print the article at home from the content in the PDF document.

The other thought I had from The Royal Society's press release was the viability of paper publications. When I do research, I don’t go to the library, look up a journal in the card catalog, and go sit on a couch with a paper copy of a journal. UCF now accepts dissertations in PDF format and requires students to submit for online archival. The library pays for access to databases of articles. It seems to me publishing in the next 25 years is going to go through growing pains. Publishing could just as easily involve submitting a PDF document for publication on an online journal, where subscribers pay for online access. I believe the archival database services would all even prefer to start with an original digital copy of a PDF document than take a paper version, scan it in, and check the file to make sure the scan is legible.

Rather than The Royal Society being concerned about doing things the old way for the apparent sake of comfort, I think they should be more concerned about the best ways to take research and put it online, in a digital format. It would give more options for including digital formats of audio, video, graphs, and interactive examples of research. Where it might cost a lot in ink and paper to print extra pages of examples, sample blank surveys, detailed survey responses, and disk space seem to be much cheaper to store a single copy and allow people to make copies.