For those not working in academia, how do you access peer reviewed research, if at all? How would you like to? How can academics get better at sharing findings?
I love when articles are simply published with Open Access and appreciate everyone who pays the extra fees for that. I look for personal or third party websites with PDFs using the title + pdf as the search term (mostly), I’ll ask a friend who has access (sometimes), and email the author (rarely).
Tbh using a personal website to liberate the PDF of the official article is the best. I can still point to the DOI but have the copy which accomplishes both things I usually need (be able to read AND cite).
Yes and it is a relief when the paper is nominally about equity issues or structural issues where it’s known the impacts are inequitable. It’s usually a hint to me - if I don’t know the authors - that they have some awareness or accountability to impacted groups and aren’t just writing about us.
Part of the problem is it is INCREDIBLY EXPENSIVE to publish open access.
Now, our university has an agreement with the publisher so it doesn't cost much, but if it hadn't, complying with my grant requirement and publishing open access could have eaten thousands of euros off my postdoc grant. XD
I work for the State of Michigan. I often write directly to the corresponding author. That works > 50% of the time. The state also has a library where we can request articles. That always works but takes longer. I also have a colleague who is doing a phd program and has access to his U's library.
I think the people who work in my division do a pretty good job of keeping up with the lit. We also have a brown-bag program and sometimes invite people to talk about their research. I'd actually love to hear *more* about what academics are learning about people in my state.
I used to keep up through everyone I followed on Twitter and starting to build the same network through who I follow here on Bluesky including subscriptions
Twitter used to be so good for keeping up with the research (and getting/sharing real time views on it). Feels like here is starting to perform that function (on some days) although it’s still too small to really do it.
I get newsletters from a few places that will highlight research. @katharinehayhoe.com has a newsletter and suggests research, for e.g. Yale Center for Climate Comms is another super helpful one for my work. Not sure if a newsletter counts as 'exchange,' tho. If I think of something else, I'll post.
(I should say that I don't think it's the norm for most people to feel like they can write the corresponding author to request the article. I do it bc I used to work in academia and appreciated when people requested articles. When I tell my coworkers I do that, they say, "You can do that?")
To be honest, used to be going through Altmetric to find a Twitter post by a coauthor linking some kind of readable format (even readcube, god forbid).
Really need them to start indexing over here.
And if any authors are on Twitter, they're bound to have posted a link to a preprint/PDF/readcube, typically with a helpful explainer thread to go with it!
Doesn't work every time, but pretty dang close in the old days. But Altmetric doesn't capture article mentions here yet, as far as I'm aware.
Wow, thanks for this. As an author, i was only tangentially aware of this stuff happening in the background, but I have never thought about using it for searches before now.
This is a hugely informative thread. From a UK perspective, it's really interesting that universities' Green OA repositories appear to have so little purchase. I suspect this is partly because of their low discoverability. Of interest @christophersmith.bsky.social ?
Absolutely. It was a great question to ask and has elicited really revealing (and generous) replies. Rather begs the question of why universities, learned societies and funders aren't asking this question on their social media and/or commissioning research that would truffle out this information....
OA repositories really struggle with maintaining support from the institution and getting articles from faculty who haven't already posted the on Research Gate or their personal site has been difficult: first you have to explain why, then how, and finally the repository person does it themself...
My OA repository experience and prof development was curtailed about 5 years ago but I doubt anything's changed, especially with the administrative pushes to off-campus IT systems.
Our Library repository does this for us. Part of the process is automated, but I imagine it takes a lot of curation work. The Dutch Taverne agreement kicks in after 6 months, after which everything that wasn't already open, automatically becomes open.
I *do* work in academia but in maths and physics, every single paper is posted on the arXiv, which is free, and there’s now a big push to use open-access journals too across the wider academic sphere. (In particular, the UKRI is making it a requirement if you’re funded by them).
Do you use any of the browser extensions that help find open copies? Eg. LibKey Nomad or Unpaywall. That helps a bit but typically you need access to a decent library (your public library will probably be able to give some access through their databases).
Most recently (Malissa Clark, UGA) by seeing the researcher cited in a lay context saying smart things, finding their academic/lab website, cruising the linked articles, and then emailing them a thank you/follow up questions.
(To be clear: I’m not sure that scales so well, or has such a high hit rate, and also exposes the academic to all kinds of nonsense. But I think broadly it’s true that finding avenues to bring the work out of academia allows curious folks to find it, and bring themselves into academia to learn more)
I use Google scholar. When pdfs are available from alt sources, I use those. I also have some expanded access from prior academic accounts. If all else fails and I really want the work, I visit academic library and use public terminal to email a copy to myself.
Good point. Academia rewards papers and income, and many academics aren't geared up to respond within tight timeframes. Publishing openly and providing digestible summaries is therefore v. important.
it's really difficult to find journals from places i know are trustworthy. most of the time i can only read the synopsis, and the education system never gave me the tools to be able to decode a lot of it & what to look out for. youtube videos are helping me learn though, n college should too soon!
navigating a world like that seems very far away and difficult for me, but i think it's because i dont have the tools to traverse it. mix of mental health (adhd) and education, probably x.x i just dont trust search engines anymore. theyre always trying to sell something
