According to a recent online study, students and faculty consider it attractive for free, downloadable scientific research to be used for citation as published research available through online subscriptions.
The study, released Thursday by BMJ, formerly known as the British Medical Journal, showed that browsing open-access research is more popular among scientists and students, but the free works were not necessarily as frequently used as subscription-only documents.
Mitchell Pryor, a UT lecturer for mechanical engineering at the Robotics Research Group, a UT Pickle Research Center group, uses his first-year mechanical engineering course to ease students into using and collecting databases for all their work.
"The whole course is database-driven," Pryor said. "We try to make it [as] easy on the first-year students as possible by having a big focus on content and not form."
Pryor said the primary database they use, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, lets students and researchers find papers available across the Internet for free, but a lot of the content comes from subscription-based services.
"It's easier to guarantee that it's a legitimate paper," Pryor said, in reference to a subscription-based service. "It's been peer-reviewed, and therefore it's a quality reference."
Pryor said that while he does encourage his students to use Google and Wikipedia as starting points for research projects, there's a disadvantage in using papers found outside of a subscription database.
"You don't know if it's been accepted or turned down or had mistakes in it that they didn't correct," he said.
UT Libraries base what research is bought or subscribed to on student and faculty responses to LiBQUAL, nationwide surveys conducted by campus libraries, said library spokesman Travis Willmann.
Based on suggestions compiled by the survey, the library is currently working on linking the UT Libraries Web site to Blackboard so faculty and students can access databases that relate to each individual course, said Ronda Rowe, the libraries' networked information bibliographer. Preliminary access to this feature will be available some time in the fall, Rowe said.
She said UT Libraries provides as many links to open-access content as they do to closed-access content bought by the University and freely available to students and faculty.
"Probably our highest goal is to provide desktop delivery of content," Rowe said. "We certainly worked on the [UT library] Web site, making things more transparent if you want to find the content."
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