Blog 3

I read all of these in order, but I wish I would have read the Weir first. I found myself really suffering through the Wagstaff in the same way I've always found myself suffering through most academic articles. After reading through the Wagstaff, I summarized it  as "This is what a periodical is, here are a bunch of them." But, it shouldn't be read the same way as a narrative, like Weir says. I feel Wagstaff is saying is that there is a scholarly periodical for pretty much everything in music.

I found the Weir tremendously valuable. I've had to read through scholarly articles before and always found myself drained mentally after the fifth time through and still not really knowing what I've read. I suppose I've always thought the author put those words together in that order to be read that way. It should be read the way the author wrote it, but in many cases (probably most actually) of scholarly writing, it just doesn't work. One gets far too caught up in the erudite and specific vocabulary and tough to penetrate tone of the article to actually retain any of the information. This sort of writing isn't intended for any average person, rather, a very specific type of person. Knowing that is the first step towards extracting the information one needs from the article. I also think the Weir article wonderfully illustrated the importance of the title. As I read some of my colleagues' blog posts I noticed their attention was grabbed by the inclusion of Harry Potter in the title (myself included). All I had to see was Harry Potter and I was drawn in, even when that title explicitly stated that it wasn't Harry Potter. Perhaps I'm no Ravenclaw after all :'(

I'm going to assume the fourth article was given as an exercise to employ the strategies laid out in the previous two, or at least I hope so, because I didn't read most of it. Instead, I read the introduction and conclusion and summarized it as "Do open access articles have greater research impact? Yes." But there are a lot of problems with that, as one finds in the last two articles. Open access is a wonderful idea, assuming that everybody is a good person, but they aren't. I believe this comic sums up predatory publishing (as well as many other things on the internet) very well. The internet is wonderful in that it allows so much information to be available to millions of people, but it isn't so wonderful at displaying what information is valuable and what isn't. This really opens the door for all kinds of unethical behavior and mistrust among academics. However, like so many other issues with the internet, it is very difficult to solve. It breeds more and more mistrust and makes it even harder to find reputable information and is a terrible shame.