Your question is very interesting for a twofold reason. Firstly, more and more ariticles articles are now freely available since the widespreading of AO journals, but our net time available to read medical and science journals is compressing everyday due to our overwhelming duties, in one hand, and in another hand, many if not most of the deepest interesting articles tend to be published in scientific journals which are nor freely available. Nonetheless, the net result is positive and free articles tend to increase our time devoted to reading published papers.

Dear Walter

I have no doubt, particularly in South America . We had two phases : before and after the globalization and the internet. Nowadays the articles are freely available and the update is easier and faster. Its possible the actualization day by day .The more we know, the less we understand

All of the above is true !

If:

Number of papers increase,

our time to read does not increase = further specialization and limitation of the reading to be carried out.

On the other hand, I think is positive the widespread of scientific knowledge in OA.

This is indeed an important issue. In my view, an increase in the number of available titles on the market of scientific journals enables better recognize and describe the issues we are dealing with. On the other hand, this fact inevitably entail an increase in the time, which is need for analysis of the literature.

I maintain, however, that the crux of the matter lies in something else. In my opinion, the most important is that the avalanche of new titles appearing on the market, more and more difficult to pick out the most valuable thoughts and comments, which often appear in the works published in these so-called "lower-ranking journals". It indeed a key issue, because for several years I noticed that the journals of the so-called "reputable" in many areas (including environmental chemistry, which I do) gradually subside space for journals of "new wave".

This is not an opinion on the basis of impact factor and other bibliometric indicators, but on the basis of personal merit assessment of papers published in the journals of each group.

Thank you for answer my topic! I agree with all the viewpoints up to now, but I would like to know about the citations... I do not know if this is just an impression or if it is actually true (I not have performed an organized study about this) , but I feel that nowadays we are citing more references in our papers than before this explosion of publications... I remember that during the decade of 1990 when searching for good references about some issue, we often found one or two good papers. However, today we can find dozen of good references with high citation numbers... I feel that today we need to cite more articles as references of our works under the risk of our submissions be rated as poorly referenced... In this way, I feel that we are being pushed to read more nowadays... What do you think?

This is related, though admittedly slightly off subject. As a grad student, I set aside an entire Friday morning for nothing but reading. Many journals arrived at the library on Thursdays, so a Friday morning was great for catching the newest articles. What happened very often is that while getting to the articles I was looking for, I discovered articles that were very interesting and useful, but that I wasn't searching for. These serendipitous findings really helped me on more than one occasion. With online searches, you go directly to the paper you are searching for without thumbing through entire issues... I miss that. All of this to say I read about as much, no more, but I do spend more time searching for poorly keyworded papers.

Dear Mark

problem about which you write is related to the topic proposed by Walter Folly. I think even very much. I do not know how well I understand your mind. You write that during searching for printed publications, often you find very interesting works going beyond the subject of what you were looking for.

My experiences are quite different. Now - when the opportunity to fairly quickly penetrate the online journals is virtually unrestricted, I sometimes consciously type in my browser "especially password" (I have experimentally tested several) and "on demand" - in a short time - I get the whole collection of interesting articles, which by browsing the printed texts I would have never reached.

Hi Andrzej,

I do agree with you completely that online journals are virtually unrestricted. Further, I am lucky to be at an institution where I have access to just about anything without searching for passwords. Because of this, I have access to almost anything I can search for, and like you, I get many more articles that are directly related to my search than I ever did before - But that is not my point.

What I was referring to is that sometimes, when physically thumbing through a journal, I would find articles that were seemingly unrelated to anything I was doing, and that I would never have searched for specifically. I found them only because they were printed adjacent to the paper I was looking for. Now, with online searches that are very good and very efficient, I get directly to all the very related articles I searched for, but not the "unrelated" articles. I realize this is very efficient, I simply meant that sometimes I would find something interesting without ever looking for it. I also realize that I "COULD" go to the E-journal's table of contents, and virtually thumb through the journal, but I just do not do it - perhaps I should.

Megan

I agree that with the increasing number of scientific journals and scientific informations, we should try to use this information more selectively and specifically. However, this approach also give a risk, that if we lose control over the level of the selectivity, we lose a proper point of view of all the scientific issues that we are exploring.

Mark

I see your point of view.

As for the final part of your last comment, it seems to me, however, that it is good sometimes to browse through page after page of several major magazines printed or available online. However, the balance here is very important because you can get lost in the reading, no longer have time for anything else.

Megan

My remark about the need to strike a balance between a fast acquisition of information and the guarantee of obtaining full information (full view on the analyzed cases) was only of a general nature.

When it comes about "data deluge", I try to carefully analyze the activity of a selected, leading research groups dealing with issues important to me.

I sincerely cannot read everything published in my fields of interest. I try to select the most interesting ones by scanning first the abstracts . It is obvious that THe PLOS Journal especialy PLOS GENETICS and PLOS BIOLOGY are excellent Journal sometimes much mote interesting than non OPEN ACCESS JOURNALS with high impact factors. More and More Journals hacve a section of OPEN ACESS ARTICLES

OA journals have of course provided lot of materials to read. The advantage with this is whenever we need more information about one particular topic, we can easily get it. Even though we don't read each and every article in all journals, OA have made the search easy. I agree with Jose Rueff in mentioning many of the valuable articles are not in OA journals

I'm inclined to agree with the opinion, that in prestigious journals more often one can find the publications of a very high value. Valuable, if only because, they often themselves a signpost for creative activity for a wide range of researchers.

But I am convinced, that thanks to the wide range of available OA journals, we can reach many valuable research ideas, that for various reasons, did not have to the chance to see the "light of day", if the only option would be publish in reputable journals.

Among other things so it is worth (maybe one must) , to look for the new publication in the OA journals, but at this point the "vicious circle" closes themselves - we return to the question of how to find the time... and in fact to conclusion that we do not have the time. So, in this situation, we have browse journals "with head on the neck" (systemic), so as not to waste time, but to get to what deserves attention.

More articles, yes. But, not the quality ones. I regret.

I for one read a lot more articles from Open access journals in comparison to articles in paid journals. For the paid articles, I have to request my friends to send me the articles which takes days sometimes.