The Monkey Cage

Is it any wonder that our discourse is so devoid of actuall evidence-based arguments?

I suspect, though, that the culture among journalists is so infused with conventional wisdom that it won’t much matter. Hell, the people who run campaigns don’t pay much to actual evidence.

APSA members can subscribe to JSTOR for $25 a year.

http://www.apsanet.org/content_5840.cfm

That doesn’t seem too onerous. It’s cheaper than getting cross-tabs.

Science needs to move towards open access journals full stop.

Get as many political scientists as you can find to sign a letter the arXiv advisory board

http://arxiv.org/ad-board.html

The arXiv has essentially solved the access problem in math and theoretical physics, and they might be convinced to move into other subject if they thought there was support in that discipline (I know the chair of the math advisory board quite well, and he’s told me that this is the main reason the arXiv doesn’t cover more subjects).

I second earlier commenter Alex. We need more open-access journals, especially high prestige ones. Where’s the PLoS for social scientists?

i half agree… we should open-source everything, but the barriers to access for Klein really aren’t so great. I mean he comes right out and admits that he’ll only read academic work if it’s spoon-fed to him by someone else or (literally) lands on his doorstep.

it’s not as if all econ journals are free; they’re behind the same paywalls as our journals. and yet he’s holding up econ as a paragon of openness. i think there’s a journalistic bias at play that ezra isn’t willing to admit.

more here:

http://ipeatunc.blogspot.com/2010/01/why-arent-political-scientists-more.html

A couple of things about Open Access (or, if you prefer, Public Access) to research that I’ve learned or come to believe after sitting on a university committee this year:

1. arXiv is immensely successful. It is also headed towards shutting down. We had a speaker from the national association that of research libraries and he pointed specifically that they’re struggling to figure out how to maintain this successful resource into the future.

2. Some universities basically require all faculty to put published research in institutional repositories. Harvard and Kansas are the two I’m sure about.

3. Surprisingly, most publishers are OK with it as long as you don’t use their typeset version.

4. Many universities now have a public repository that works for these purposes. This model makes more sense in my opinion than arXiv because the costs are dispersed rather than concentrated. Google Scholar does the indexing (sort of). An excellent example of how use one such a repository is here (tooting my own horn): http://opensiuc.lib.siu.edu/pn_wp/

5. There is a surprising amount of push back within universities about this. We are currently considering a policy similar to the one passed by Kansas and I continue to be amazed at the resistance of professors. Much of that stems from what I think is confusion between OA Publishing and OA to publications. Get informed.

6. Klein has another point, though, in that we don’t do much to explain why anyone should care about our results and even less to explain them. I think APSA could do a much better job of this, particularly by building more connections with the media and even developing a blog of its own to call attention to our work.

WKW: If there is one person to criticize for inattention to political science, it is most certainly not Ezra Klein. But your points is certainly well-taken. As I said in the post, there is a demand side here, and convincing journalists etc. to follow political science will not be easy. But we can make it easier at the margins.

Scott: Those comments are very useful. Henry and I have begun to make contact with APSA about this.

DC has a rather large library located near a metro station not far from the Capitol. They are open late a few days a week and open Saturdays. They’ve got lots of print, of course, but also public access computers connected to most major academic journal databases. Perhaps some enterprising young journalist could do a little bit of that leg work journalists talk about and head down there every now and then with a list of citations (created as they come up in the course of day-to-day reporting) to pick up. Just about anyone can get a library card.