Post 1: Retro Reprint Requests

In the September 2009 issue of the Scientist Steven Wiley has a short commentary on the disappearing phenomenon of the reprint request in academic publishing. Before online journals with open access were common, researchers commonly sent request cards directly to the authors of articles they were interested in. Authors would then mail the articles directly to the researchers, who may not have been able to find the full-text articles and only found a citation in an index.

Wiley laments the passing of the reprint request for several reasons, but mostly because they provided a valuable feedback mechanism. Authors could know which articles provoked the most interest and know who was working on similar topics, as well as even sometimes read short notes from the researchers involved. In addition, they provide a valuable reality check in the case of articles that the author may have thought to have more importance than the academic community acknowledges. Requests often provided detailed information on the researcher, their department, affiliations and subject interests.

It is interesting that Wiley bemoans the loss of reprint requests as a "rapid feedback mechanism" when we have a similar function in the online sphere: e-mail. However, his point in general is definitely valid. Authors submitting to institutional repositories and similar online collections don't have any direct way of knowing who exactly is reading their journals and what their level of involvement is. We seem to be bound by standard web practice, which encourages simple anonymous statistics (page counts, clickthroughs) that are of little importance to the academic author interested in the community that surrounds their work. Simple page counts do not reflect more subtle details such as whether someone was simply browsing and scanning articles, or whether they took the time to read one in full.

We need to consider the community building aspects of academic cyberinfrastructure in addition to their technological aspects. Systems such as validated logins which would identify users to authors of articles might be useful in future attempts to bridge the gap between readers and authors. We can easily imagine an institutional repository with social-networking-style features that tracks affiliations, connections and research interests, as well as articles read, tagged and commented on.