Blue Collar Scientist

Evolution education in this country (the United States) is in some serious trouble. As is well known, we have a large population of people whom the schools have failed, who believe that the theory of evolution makes claims that it does not. In place of the reality of evolution, they have chosen to believe the creation myth of a bronze-age middle eastern religion, which was largely plagiarized from four earlier Mesopotamian myths. The worldview of this “alternative” asserts that knowledge is essentially undiscoverable and unchangeable, that observations of the universe must conform to limits that are pre-defined by these myths, and that people who do not agree with the repressive system of “morality” that accompanies these mythic beliefs are unfit to exist in society.

Accordingly, it is very nice to find a free periodical resource designed to aid those doing education and outreach on the topic of evolution. Springer has a journal called Evolution: Education and Outreach, designed to help instructors of K-16 with their activities. And they have decided that during 2008, anyone may receive the journal free online. This is stale news; somehow I missed it when it was launched last November.

Free access is good, very good indeed! And Springer should be commended for this.

On the other hand, they’ve made it painfully difficult to get a copy of the journal online. As far as I can tell, it is actually impossible to get a copy of the journal online.

What you can do instead is get a separate copy of each article in the journal, requiring at least 21 separate downloads for a single issue of the journal.

To do this, go to the very counterintuitive page that apparently lists issues of the journal. As I write, there is only one issue of the journal available. But don’t be confused by the link to “Online First,” because that’s not it. What we’re looking for is Number 1 / January, 2008 - click on that instead.

Once you have done that, you’ll be on a page that lists the articles in this issue of the journal. At the top of each section are the article titles. Other than the title, there’s no way to determine what the article is about. If you click the title, you don’t get the article - you get an abstract (sometimes), and you get some information about who, if anyone, has cited back to that article. Clicking the title is about as expensive in terms of effort and download time as just downloading the article and skimming the first couple paragraphs to learn if it is topically relevant with what you are doing. So there’s no real point to clicking on the title.

To get the article, you need to look a few lines below the title, to the “Text:” field, and click on either PDF or HTML, depending on which format you want to read the article in. I’ve now read a few articles in each format. Strangely, PDFs download a lot faster than HTML (sometimes HTML articles simply won’t load at all). And if you click on the HTML link, you may wonder why nothing happens, depending on what browser you are using and how it is configured - the HTML link insists on opening a new tab or window without telling you, and this can be puzzling if the new page opens hidden behind another one.

Anyway, if you do all this properly, you can read the whole journal only after an absolute minimum of 24 clicks (and 21 save-as dialogs if you are saving PDFs locally to read offline). Everywhere else on the web, one click would do to read a PDF version of a journal. And don’t fool around with the “save this item” or “download this list” icons, because they don’t do what normal web users think.

This system sucks, and it will obviously discourage people from reading. I know Springer is a journal publisher, and I know publishing journals in this way makes sense when your readers are highly focused on specific topics. But they’re publishing an EPO aid in this case, not a research journal, and most of its audience is not going to be savvy to Springer’s proprietary online journal publishing system. Nor will they find its bells and whistles useful.

The contributors to and publishers of this journal need to take a look at what we’re up against: a horde of ignorant evangelists who enjoy single-click downloading of articles at their primary “research” sites such as Answers in Genesis.

The resource content is actually pretty good. I recommend going and reading it if you are doing science EPO that ever touches on evolution, as I am.

Springer: Single-click download, please. Until then, you get a D-.