RE: Who gets hurt by Open Access?

["David Goodman" <David.Goodman@liu.edu>]

The real people -- the real patients -- are not a uniform group. They are
at various levels of general knowledge, scientific sophistication, and
heath awareness. They and their families may be well or poorly served by
health services.  Their health problems may be well addressed at lay
levels, as for diabetes, or less well. I have immense respect for the
ADA--not as the only group supplying lay information--but as one doing an
exemplary job, against which others can be measured

I certainly do not argue that the single important thing is the supply of
journal articles to those who can potentially need them, rather, there is
a need for better information at all levels, with the access to journal
articles being one need among many.

Indeed, my principle activity is not advocating for OA, but training new
information workers.  I try to teach all my library students to at least
know what characterizes a reliable source, and how to help library users
find basic information. I also try to show to them how to find relatively
technical material that will be broad-based, comprehensive, reliable, and
readable, such as good recent reviews.  This is obviously not the full
training of a medical librarian, but I would hope that each public library
will be able to have at least one librarian with such a level of
competence.  Pubmed is there, and the library patrons will use it. We
ought at least accept the responsibility to help them to use fruitfully.

Dr. David Goodman
Associate Professor
Palmer School of Library and Information Science
Long Island University
dgoodman@liu.edu