A literature for all conservationists, everywhere?

Abstract

Forty-five years ago the engineer John Joseph Leeming observed that widening roads to ease traffic congestion encourages the problem it aims to solve (Leeming, ). This is induced demand: increased supply drives an increase in demand. Is induced demand also afflicting the peer-reviewed scientific literature? Both in conservation science and science generally there are new, and more voluminous, journals each year. Estimates of annual growth in the number of journals range from .% (Mabe, ) to .% (Larsen & von Ins, ). In  there were an estimated , scientific journals (Larsen & von Ins, ), and more than  million articles are published annually (Björk et al., ; Larsen & von Ins, ). A recent cartoon (Munroe, ) depicted the publication of a new scientific article every  seconds. As a single, outstanding example of this trend PLoS ONE, launched in , published its ,th article  years later (Pattinson, ). Although training of more scientists, increases in research funding, growth of universities internationally and emergence of new areas of research-including conservation sciencemust be contributing to this rise in research output, the main driver of induced demand for journal space may lie elsewhere. Publish or perish is alive and well. Researchers have to publish to secure their careers, and use of publication metrics to measure merit exacerbates demand for pages in higher-scoring journals. The most widely used metric, the Thomson ISI Impact Factor, evaluates a journal by its citation score. Although 'it is one thing to use impact factors to compare journals and quite another to use them to compare authors' (Garfield, ), the influence of this metric continues because it provides a convenient, albeit one-dimensional, measure of the multi-dimensional output of a researcher. This is despite its documented failings (Kokko & Sutherland, ) and despite the call of The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment () for a halt to the practice of using it to assess individuals. Citation is not all, however. For example, citations to articles in Oryx represent only c. % of the number of times an article is downloaded. How is this literature otherwise used? In conservation science an article commonly has aims beyond its contribution to scholarship, such as to influence policy-makers and inform conservation practice. It remains unclear how we can best measure the full influence of an individual article-or even to what extent this is important-but new methods for evaluating the impacts of conservation research (Sutherland et al., ) may illuminate, or even change, the relationship that researchers have with the conservation literature.

Access to scientific literature by the conservation community

“…Much concern has been raised about the challenges to the scientific process faced by Africa, Asia-Pacific, and Latin America and the Caribbean (Barber et al, 2014;Pasgaard & Strange, 2013). This geographical variation in where conservation science is produced and published is potentially related to the geographical variation in access to the literature (Karlsson, Srebotnjak & Gonzales, 2007;Fisher, 2015;Gossa, Fisher & Milner-Gulland, 2015;Nuñez et al, 2019). An information gap as well as ''digital divide'' (Coloma & Harris, 2005) between lower and higher income countries has long been acknowledged, and our results confirm that the conservation community in high-income countries have greater easy access than their counterparts in the rest of the world.…”

Access to Scientific Literature by the Conservation Community

“…Much concern has been raised about the challenges to the scientific process faced by Africa, Asia-Pacific, and Latin America and the Caribbean (Barber et al, 2014, Pasgaard & Strange, 2013). This geographical variation in where conservation science is produced and published is potentially related to the geographical variation in access to the literature (Karlsson et al, 2007; Fisher, 2015; Gossa et al, 2015; Nuñez et al, 2019). An information gap as well as “digital divide” (Coloma & Harris, 2005) between lower and higher income countries has long been acknowledged, and our results confirm that the conservation community in high-income countries have greater easy access than their counterparts in the rest of the world.…”

Peer Review #1 of "Access to scientific literature by the conservation community (v0.1)"

“…Much concern has been raised about the challenges to the scientific process faced by Africa, Asia-Pacific, and Latin America and the Caribbean (Barber et al, 2014, Pasgaard & Strange, 2013. This geographical variation in where conservation science is produced and published is potentially related to the geographical variation in access to the literature (Karlsson et al, 2007;Fisher, 2015;Gossa et al, 2015;Nuñez et al, 2019). An information gap as well as "digital divide" (Coloma & Harris, 2005) between lower and higher income countries has long been acknowledged, and our results confirm that the conservation community in high-income countries have greater easy access than their counterparts in the rest of the world.…”