Some free Twitter advice

I am not be a social media guru, but I do have some advice for information professionals (and others) who are starting to use twitter.  I know that there is no right or wrong way to use twitter, but I think that some uses are more courteous than others.

1. Say "Thanks" in tweets.  I tend to follow people more if I see that they are thanking others for help or advice.
2. Look at your @ replies.  Someone is trying to talk with you or say something to you.  Respond to them, or favorite their tweet to let them know that you saw it.
3. Retweet the good things that others say.  Don't just send out your own messages.  
4. Use MT for a Modified Tweet instead of an RT in some cases.  In order to get information to fit into 140 characters, and if you want to RT what someone else has said (or make a short response), you might have to modify it a little bit to get the URL to work, or to have space to put in a hashtag.
5. Use standard hashtags so that others can follow along a topic or discussion.  (And, spell the #hahstag correctly, otherwise, people won't find it.)  For example, I follow the #openaccess hashtag.  While I could follow or tweet about this with the #OA hashtag, I figure OA probably has lots of other meanings--#openaccess is unique, and lots of other people use that.  If you are arranging an event (conference session or whatever), make sure that you have a twitter hashtag announced beforehand.
6. Don't feel that you have to send out the same information numerous times.  Some people who think they are social media gurus say they send out the same information multiple times a day, so that people in different parts of the world will see.  If you are sharing such wonderful information, people will keep track of what you say, no matter when you say it.
7. Schedule a tweet or blog post only when needed.  I really don't care to time my tweets or blog posts to get posted during the right time of the day or week, but there are some times when it is good to do so.  For example, for the library twitter account, I will schedule a tweet about an event to go out an hour or so before the event to remind some people.  If a library service is going to be under maintenance, I will schedule a tweet to let people know that service X is down about 15 minutes before hand.
8. Use a URL shortener like bit.ly or dlvr.it.
9. Use a dashboard like hootsuite to keep track of replies, conversations, hashtags, what messages you sent, etc.

Of course, there are times when rules are made to be broken, but this is what I try to do.

A not-comprehensive chronology of reactions to Elsevier purchasing Mendeley

I first heard that Elsevier might purchase Mendeley back on January 17, 2013.  I blogged about it over at Collaborative Librarianship News which has a link to the TechCrunch piece of the same day.  I'll bet other news sources also picked it up.

Then on April 8th and 9th, Elsevier and Mendeley announced that it was official.  This created quite a flurry of opinion concerning the merger.  Here are some of the reaction pieces.

April 8, 2013

http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/08/confirmed-elsevier-has-bought-mendeley-for-69m-100m-to-expand-open-social-education-data-efforts/
Confirmed: Elsevier Has Bought Mendeley For $69M-$100M To Expand Its Open, Social Education Data Efforts

http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2013/04/08/a-matter-of-perspective-elsevier-acquires-mendeley-or-mendeley-sells-itself-to-elsevier/
A Matter of Perspective — Elsevier Acquires Mendeley . . . or, Mendeley Sells Itself to Elsevier

April 9, 2013

http://enjoythedisruption.com/post/47527556151/my-thoughts-on-mendeley-elsevier-why-i-left-to-start 
My thoughts on Mendeley/Elsevier & why I left to start PeerJ

http://chronicle.com/article/In-Sale-to-Elsevier-Mendeley/138449
Sale to Elsevier Casts Doubt on Mendeley's Openness (Closed access article???)

http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/2013/04/09/elsevier-acquires-mendeley-all-the-data-about-what-you-read-share-and-highlight/
Elsevier acquires Mendeley + all the data about what you read, share, and highlight (David Weinberger)

http://bjoern.brembs.net/comment-n908.html
Elsevier changes strategy and buys Mendeley instead of shutting it down

http://paidcontent.org/2013/04/09/is-it-a-good-thing-that-elsevier-bought-mendeley/
Is it a good thing that Elsevier bought Mendeley?

https://plus.google.com/u/0/109377556796183035206/posts/e4iZMQfoENc 
Elsevier bought Mendeley (Peter Suber)

http://www.salon.com/2013/04/09/elsevier_all_your_data_belongs_to_us/
Elsevier: All your data belongs to us. The huge scientific publisher sparks resentment by gobbling up a popular online gathering place. Sound familiar?

http://svpow.com/2013/04/09/a-few-words-on-elseviers-acquisition-of-medeley/
A few words on Elsevier’s acquisition of Medeley (Mike Taylor)

http://paidcontent.org/2013/04/09/the-empire-acquires-the-rebel-alliance-mendeley-users-revolt-against-elsevier-takeover/
The Empire acquires the rebel alliance: Mendeley users revolt against Elsevier takeover

http://colditzjb.wordpress.com/2013/04/09/mendelete/
Word of the day: “mendelete” (Jason B Colditz)

April 10, 2013

http://www.guardian.co.uk/higher-education-network/blog/2013/apr/10/elsevier-buys-mendeley-academic-reaction
The sale of the London-based startup to the publishing giant has prompted strong reactions from the academic community – is the partnership good or bad news for open access research?

http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2013/04/10/elsevier-buys-document-management-platform-mendeley
Elsevier Buys Document-Management Platform Mendeley

http://scientopia.org/blogs/christinaslisrant/2013/04/10/the-latest-land-grab-in-the-lis-world-citation-managers/
The latest land grab in the LIS world: Citation managers (Christine Pikas)

http://sylvaindeville.net/2013/04/10/to-mendelete-or-not-to-mendelete/
To #mendelete or not to #mendelete?

http://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/page.cgi?post=60256
"It appears (unsurprisingly) that Mendeley users are not happy with Elsevier's acquisition of the company."

[Added http://www.darkrepository.net/blog/garret/elseviers-slice-of-big-data-pie "Elsevier's slice of Big Data pie" on April 15, 2013.]

April 11, 2013

http://blogs.plos.org/mfenner/2013/04/11/mendeley-and-elsevier/
Mendeley and Elsevier (By Martin Fenner)

http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2013/04/11/mendeley-elsevier.html
why I’m quitting Mendeley (and why my employer has nothing to do with it)

I'm sure I've missed some good ones, but feel free to let me know of major sources.  If you have time, it is also interesting to read all of the comments, particularly on the last one by danah boyd at zephoria.org.

Personally, I am going to keep my Mendeley account so that I can keep on putting citations into the Open Access Irony Award Group.

** Edit **  Here are some more that came out more recently.

April 12, 2013

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/04/elsevier-mendeley-journals-science-software.html
When the Rebel Alliance Sells Out. Posted by David Dobbs.

http://del-fi.org/post/47782042378/lessons-from-mendeley-wheres-the-open-in-the-model
Lessons from Mendeley: Where’s The Open In The Model? (John Wilbanks)

April 13, 2013

http://cameronneylon.net/blog/whats-the-right-model-for-shared-scholarly-communications-infrastructure/
What’s the right model for shared scholarly communications infrastructure? (Cameron Neylon)

April 15, 2013

http://svpow.com/2013/04/15/seriously-mendeley-people-what-did-you-expect/ and http://svpow.com/2013/04/15/seriously-mendeley-people-what-did-you-expect/#update
Seriously, Mendeley people, what did you expect? (Mike Taylor)

UU chalice lighting this weekend in which I plug #openaccess and twitter

I am going to be lighting the Chalice for the Jefferson Unitarian Church this Sunday, January 6, 2013.  I get about 350-400 words and three minutes of fame.  I figured out a way to get in a plug for Open Access and using twitter for scholarly communication.

Michael Dowd is the visiting minister, and he will be talking about evolution and other scientific stuff. Check out his book (Thank God for Evolution) if you are so inclined.

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I was supposedly raised Roman Catholic (which has a hierarchical structure), but I always seemed to question authority, and I do not always believe everything I read.  As a kid, I always asked “why”, probably to the point of annoyance for my Mom and Dad.  Some of the stories from the Bible just didn’t make sense to me.  For example, as a teenager, I questioned the story behind Noah and his Ark.  Why would an all-knowing, all-loving God kill billions of life forms in the 40 day flood? How could all of the Earth’s species fit onto that small boat.  What did the carnivores eat when they were onboard?  There are many stories and miracles from the Bible that I am skeptical of.  Why am I so skeptical?

Lack of evidence.  For me, my God (or Higher Power or whatever) is rooted in the language of science and mathematics, and this “thing” provides us with evidence about the what, when and how the Universe works. (And some of the whys.)  The Universe reveals facts about itself to us through scientific discovery.  The evidence shows that we are “star stuff” as Carl Sagan used to say.   The evidence shows that we evolved from other life forms--the theory of evolution is just about as accepted in science as the theory of gravity.  The evidence shows that the light and energy we get from the sun (through nuclear fusion) and other stars are what provides us with ALL of our energy here on Earth.

While I may not believe in a traditional God, I do believe in love, in caring, and in helping other people get along on this little blue planet.

I am also a librarian, and I am a big user of Twitter.  If you followed me on twitter, you would know how passionate I am about Open Access to scientific information.  In the area of scholarly and scientific communication, I find social networking tools on the Internet to be a great way for people to connect, interact and to learn from people from all over the world.

So, I light this chalice (which includes energy from the sun) in the spirit that we all continue to learn more about science and the universe that we live in.

Why we need open access--$192.95

My kid, a 7th grader, is doing some research for his science class.  He randomly picked a biome from a hat, and it was the Neritic Zone in the ocean.   The assignment asked him to pick a species that lives in that zone, so he chose the Conus Geographus (Geography Cone Snail) which lives in the Great Barrier Reef (and other places, too). 

So, going to the handy dandy Google Scholar database, we looked at the first 12 articles for the Conus Geographus to see which might be useful. Six of the twelve are freely available, but we have to pay for the other six from the publisher.  If I was not affiliated with a place that has access to a lot of scientific journals, I might think that I would have to pay $192.95 for those other six articles. (I did not see green OA versions of those six articles, either.) This is the reason why we need more open access to research and scholarship.  Science research is NOT just needed by scholars who work at subscribing universities. 

If I was not affiliated with a university, I would just ignore those articles that are hidden behind paywalls.  Too bad that the ACS journals and some of the Elsevier journals would not get used by the 7th grader.  Actually, one of the Elsevier journals had some of their articles freely available.  Thanks FEBS Letters.

The joy of having print books around you in a library

My academic library has been going through a renovation for over a year, and it continues through March of 2013. During that time, about 98% of the collection had been moved to storage.  (We have a very small reference collection in print.) Patrons can request materials, and they will be delivered within 2 hours.  It really is amazing, but that is besides the point.

During the middle of the renovation, the administration of the university tried to make sure that most (about 80%) of the collection was held off site even after the renovation was done.  They see the library as a cost center instead of as a source of inspiration.  The faculty and students rebelled.  The librarians documented multiple reasons why more of the collection needed to be held on site.  Much of the reasoning was browsability.  But, it was difficult to find articles that documented qualitative research.  (I think we did find some.) These next two blog posts could have been useful at the time, but they were not published when we needed them.  Thanks Barbara and Bohyun.

I recently visited the Brooklyn College Library for the STELLA Unconference, and I was able to simply browse the stacks.  (Yeah, I know, the ebooks are not there...)  I found a book concerning the development of the Hubble Space Telescope simply by browsing the print collection. (The book is also online.) It would have been difficult for me to find this book using the catalog, because the Space Telescope was not named after Edwin Hubble yet.  It was simply known as the Space Telescope in the mid 1970's.  I was able to skim the book looking for a specific author, but he was not there.  I really miss not having a big collection of books around me.  If only the administrators cherished the book collection the same way the students and faculty do.

Clubs and cliques in STM publishing and the impact on Open Access (#openaccess)

I know that one the major reasons Open Access has had a hard time getting a foothold into the publishing world is because of the clubishness of science and scientists.  People often do not know about the social aspects of scientists and their work.  This is one of the reasons that associations, societies [like clubs] and conferences play such an important part of a scientist's career.

Everybody wants to feel that they belong by being a member of a variety of social groups [clubs].  Scientists are no different, and there are differences from one club to the next.  Some are more exclusive than others.  There are clubs of scientists who were educated at Ivy League schools [a pretty small club], and clubs of those who haven't been.  There are other kinds of clubs, such as the set of people who:

• Work at an ivy league school
• Are a tenured professor at an ivy league school
• Got 1600 (or 2400) on the SAT
• Published multiple times in Science/Nature/Cell/PRL/JACS
• Were award winners in a society like the ACS or the American Physical Society
• Received a grant of $1M plus from the NIH
• Are members of the National Academy of Sciences
• Carry a public library card 
• Are short, slightly pudgy middle-aged balding men with two dogs
• Make beer at home

Some of these clubs are more prestigious than others.  (Note, I am a member of two of the clubs noted above.)  Scientists generally try to join the clubs that are the most exclusive.  In other words, they want to be members of groups that exclude the most number of other people, so that they look good in comparison.  (Side note: Some science fields don't like whistleblowers, too.  They may not be seen as playing well with others within those clubs.)

So, what does this all have to do with Open Access?

Scientists like the clubs that are prestigious and are exclusive.  Some scientists like the fact that only relevant subscribers can read their articles in toll-access journals.   If you work for a rich institution that can afford a subscription to a journal like Tetrahedron Letters ($16,773 list price for an annual subscription, or if you or your institution can afford to buy articles as needed), then you must be at a place deemed good enough to read it.  These scientists may not even post green OA versions of their articles, even though the publisher allows it.

Administrators may use value judgments to say that if you published in a 4 star journal, then your work must be good because it is difficult to get articles accepted by that journal.  Hence, you may look good simply because you are a member of that particular club.  If you have great articles that are not published in four star journals, you may have a much harder time getting your work noticed by the administrators.  However, it has been shown that simply having an article in a prestigious journal (with a high impact factor) does not mean that any specific accepted article is any good. 

Some Open Access publishing sources are trying to break down this exclusivity mindset and thought process.  Journals like PLOS ONE have a different standard of acceptance. Even with the different standard, the journal still rejects about 30% of incoming papers.  Some scientists see this as a lower standard, and hence they may think that all of the articles in PLOS ONE must be of low quality.  Of course, that is not true. (Note: if you care, PLOS ONE has an impact factor of about 4.0 which is pretty good overall.)

Scientists are trying to figure out different ways to measure quality research, but the impact factor will probably used as a proxy for article quality for many years to come, partially because people may not know about alternative metrics.

PLOS ONE is just one example.  Most Open Access journals are trying to break the mold and change the mindset of some scientists and publishers who still want to limit access to scientific research to the exclusive members of certain clubs and groups.  Will you help me change the system?

Open Access books X 2: Crawford & Suber #openaccess

I finished these two Open Access books (One by Peter Suber, and the other by Walt Crawford) a while ago, but I haven't been able to blog about them until now.  I was thinking of comparing and contrasting the two books, but I think it will be easier to just pull out my favorite parts from each book separately.  

Here are the overviews.

Walt Crawford. Open Access: What You Need to Know Now, Chicago: American Library Association. 2011. (Some of the book is also on Google Books.)

This is a pretty quick read.  I usually take forever to read books, and I read this is just two days.  I am sure a fast reader could whip through this in an afternoon.

Walt begins with a section on Who Cares?  He clearly explains why librarians of all stripes and flavors should care about understanding the basic underpinnings of OA.

Here are some quotes and insights that struck me.

Les Carr, repository manager at the University of Southampton, noted that "Repositories are hard work because changing researchers' working practices is hard work and I guess there's no single magic solution that's going to make that efford disappear." (Page 32-33.)  In other words, it takes more work than just setting up a computer with some software on the Internet somewhere.  It takes work to get scholars to change their workflows and practices.

In the section on Why Change?  Walt said that in order to get scholars to change their practices, "They need to prefer OA journals for new papers when that makes sense.  They need to deposit existing papers and assure that they have (and use) the rights to deposit new papers when OA journals don't make sense.  Librarians need to have scholars change, but scholars need reasons to change.  That's an ongoing issue for librarians and libraries, one where you can't do it yourself but need to take part in moving things forward."  (Page 37) Yes, we need some good carrots to lead scholars to change their behavior.

Chapter 4 addressed controversies.  Walt noted in the section concerning "Researchers already have all the access they need" that Alan Adler claimed "there is no crisis in the world of scholarly publishing, or in the dissemination of scientific materials." (Page 49.)  Of course this is wrong.  Even the largest institutions in first world countries (Harvard, for example) do not provide access to all of the materials that are needed by their students and faculty.   Walt also did a good job addressing responses such as "The public can always get access to articles from the public libraries" and that "Scholarly articles are intended for other scholars and world just confuse laymen." (Page 50.)  Many other misunderstandings are addressed.

On pages 60-61, Walt lists some open questions that could be answered with research into scholarly communication practices.  Some of them are:

• How much publishing is there in a particular discipline?  What are the ways to estimate the number of articles or pages publishing in that discipline?
• What percentage of that corpus is available as OA, either green or gold?
• What percentage of papers are CC-By, CC-By-NC or other?
• What are the business models of various journals or publishers who do not have author-side fees?
• How are researchers responding to funder and university policies?  Do these policies change where they submit their work?

In a way, I see Walt's book as the practical book of Open Access for librarians.  The next book covers more of the philosophical underpinnings.

Peter Suber. Open Access. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 2012. (The book will be Open Access as of June 2013, and a bunch of the book is available at Google Books.)

If you want see or hear more from the author, here are some good audio and video clips of Peter talking about the book.  Here are some good sections of the book.

Peter noted that scholars "don't do it [publish articles] to earn profits from the results.  They are all nonprofit.  They certainly don't do it to make scholarly writings into gifts to enrich publishers, especially when conventional publishers erect access barriers at the expense of research." (Page 14.)  Yes, scholars should not be working to provides profits to the commercial publishers.

On page 18, it was noted that Tim O'Reilly said that "OA doesn't threaten publishing; it only threatens existing publishers who do not adapt."

"OA isn't an attempt to punish or undermine conventional publishers.  OA is an attempt to advance the interests of research, researchers, and research institutions." (Page 24.) My comment to this would be that if conventional commercial publishers are undermined, I would not be heartbroken.

On page 25, Peter noted that the "publishing lobby sometimes argues that the primary beneficiaries of OA are lay readers, perhaps to avoid acknowledging how many professional researchers lack access, or perhaps to set up the patronizing counter-argument that lay people don’t care to read research literature and wouldn’t understand it if they tried."

A study from the UK-based Research Information Network reported that "60 percent [of researchers] said that access limitations hindered their research, and 18 percent said the hindrance was significant." (Page 30.)

"Conventional publishers regard easy online sharing as a problem while researchers and libraries regard it as a solution.  The internet is widening the gap between the interests of conventional publishers and the interests of researchers and research institutions." (Page 35.)

"OA is a kind of access, not a kind of editorial policy.  It's not intrinsically tied to any particular business model or method of digital preservation." (Page 103.)  Many scholars know about some of the larger OA journals that have author-side page charges, but they don't know that roughly 70% of all OA journals do not have author-side fees.

"As the late Jim Gray used to say, 'May all your problems be technical.'" (Page 112.)  Yes, the technical problems of publishing open access journals and articles have been solved, but we still have the social problems of getting more and more scholars to understand and support the OA ecosystem.

Also on page 112, Peter noted that OA could include "the whole shebang" of knowledge claims, proposals, hypotheses, conjectures, arguments, analysis, evidence, data, algorithms, methods evaluations, interpretations, discussion, criticism, dissent, summaries and reviews, and more.

On page 115-116, he covered who needs OA?  "It's easy to agree that not everyone needs it.  But in the case of OA, there's no easy way to identify those who do and those who don't. In addition, there's no easy way, and no reason, to deliver it only to those who need it, and deny it to everyone else."  He continued with "OA allows us to provide access to everyone who cares to have access, without patronizing guesswork about who really wants it, who really deserves it, and who would really benefit from it."  The rest of pages 116-117 continues to counter the argument about lay readers not needing access to research.

A Harris poll showed that "an overwhelming majority of Americans wanted OA for publicly funded research.  83 percent wanted it for their doctors and 82 percent wanted it for everyone." (Page 118.)

And finally--"Even if we acknowledge the need for cultural change in the transition to OA--far more critical than technological change--it's easy to underestimate the cultural barriers and the time required to work through them.  OA may be compatible with copyright, peer review, profit, print, prestige, and preservation.  But that doesn't quiet resistance when those facts about it are precisely the ones hidden by confident false assumptions." (Page 167.)

On the need for social change in the #openaccess and scholarly communication system

I have written a little bit in the past about how the culture of information sharing and dissemination is different from one discipline or field of research to the next.

Barbara Fister recently wrote in Inside Higher Ed about how we need more than just technological change to create greater access [Open Access] to scholarship, we need to create a culture where scholars are encouraged to share their research using Open Access methods. This is true for those in the sciences, the social sciences and in the humanities. She noted:

Much harder is changing the cultural practices that surround publishing, the ones that assign value to certain prestigious journals and university presses, and then assign value to scholars by proxy, relying on publishers to curate our faculties (a task university presses didn’t sign on for, I should add).

Of course, researchers and faculty are concerned with the perceived prestige of the sources they publish in.  Harvard is trying to convince the faculty that they should move the prestige to Open Access. But, that tactic may not work at all institutions and fields.  Some fields like chemistry have strong ties to industry, and there is some reluctance for many chemists to share their knowledge widely (for financial reasons, patent reasons, etc.).  [See page 20 of this PDF report.]  Some in the humanities may have concerns with others sharing (tweeting, blogging, etc.) their work that the author thinks is inappropriate.  However, most scientists would be happy to know that their work is being discussed in non-traditional scholarly channels.

The policies of tenure and promotion committees vary from institution to institution, and from department to department.  If we are going to truly promote greater access to research and the literature (and data and everything else), we (OA advocates) need to provide greater incentives for the researchers with different tenure and promotion policies.  This starts with the premise that Open Access is the default mode of scholarship (PDF), and that if they want to hide their research in a closed toll-access journal (or a journal that does not allow for green OA versions, or in a low-circulation book), then they will need to jump through hoops to submit articles/chapters to such journals and books.

This opinion piece in Aljazeera also noted the culture of some academics to hide their research from the rest of the world, because some researchers want to only share their research with a small set of other researchers through toll-access journals or books--to only those with the correct keys to that set of knowledge. Sarah Kendzior wrote:

Academic publishing is structured on exclusivity. Originally, this exclusivity had to do with competition within journals. Acceptance rates at top journals are low, in some disciplines under 5 per cent, and publishing in prestigious venues was once an indication of one’s value as a scholar.

Today, it all but ensures that your writing will go unread. "The more difficult it is to get an article into a journal, the higher the perceived value of having done so," notes Katheen Fitzpatrick, the Director of Scholarly Communication at the Modern Language Association. "But this sense of prestige too easily shades over into a sense that the more exclusively a publication is distributed, the higher its value."

When we convince tenure and promotion committees of the value of sharing research through Open Access channels, and that OA has more benefit to the institution (and the department and the individual) than hiding the research in supposedly prestigious toll-access sources, then the value of OA will go up as more and more t&p committees and funders demand it.

Scholars--Don't give away your work for free: Synthesizing many scholarly communication issues tonight

It seems like scholars and researchers are finally starting to get the point that they shouldn't be giving away their work for free to commercial publishers who then sell back that content to libraries, at often-times huge profits.  Libraries do not exist to make sure that commercial publishers can rake in huge amounts of cash for their stakeholders.

This even holds true for non-profit societies such as the American Chemical Society who act as if they are a commercial outfit.  See this Chronicle article (temporary full text access) and Jenica's posts about them on her blog and in CHMNINF.  Other bullies have also been recently outed.  [Edited to add: The ACS is scared of the new information environment (including social networking sites such as blogs and Twitter (and discussion lists?) where they can't control all of the terms and the language of librarians.  They respond with fear, uncertainty and doubt to attack librarians who dare question their position.]

In other Open Access news, the SCOAP3 deal seems to be moving along. 

I just finished reading Peter Suber's book on Open Access.  Thankfully, John wrote a great overview of the book similar to what I was going to say.  In the next day or seven, I will try to compare and contrast Suber's OA book with Walt Crawford's OA book.  As John notes, they are complementary, and do not compete for the same audience.  Both are very worthwhile reads.

[Another edit: I forgot to mention all of the stuff going on around the American Historical Association.  Fun reading.  Especially the post from Barbara.]

Good night. 

Some statements from scientists and researchers noting that Open Access isn't needed by the general public

Statements such as the following really chap my hide and get my goat.  Some scientists and researches seem to think that the general public is too stupid to be able to use scientific articles and information.  GAAAHHHH!

• Lord Robert Winston noted that “Open Access isn’t going to solve the world’s problems at all. I don’t believe it really contributes greatly to public engagement.” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yELZ3kbFj1w about 48 minutes in) and “Clarity, relevance and perhaps interaction are more important than open access. Society has paid for our science, so we have a duty to communicate, but electronic media may not be the best ways to engage the public.” (http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=419254) 
• From this Scholarly Kitchen post -- “Despite accessibility, the information remains inaccessible in any functional sense — they [the general public] can’t apply it, understand it competently, or put it into context. The information is accessible, but the person has no access to its real value.” 
• Chemistry World article -- “The vast majority of people who need regular access to journals - primarily researchers - belong to institutions or companies with subscriptions to the journals they want to read. How much would the general public actually gain from access to complex, technically written and jargon-heavy articles?”
• Sandy Thatcher noted in an email to me and others on a discussion list [scholcomm@ala.org on January 8, 2012] that -- Laypeople/General public would not be able to benefit “from the more abstract theoretical discussions that occur in journal articles that they are very likely not going to understand anyway.”