I have been working on a post that does a deep analysis of “Hamlet” and “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead,” but have nearly given up on it altogether. I have the bulk of the analysis done, nevertheless there is a key article that I want to cite which ties the analysis together perfectly. Sadly, this article of wonders is a peer reviewed academic article. In laymen’s terms this means that the article was written by a university scholar, and then reviewed by an established panel to ensure that the article was academically correct, and “important.” In my words, this means that you can’t view it unless you pay for a subscription to the academic website that hosts the article, or are lucky enough to attend a university that pays this cost for you. (Hooray school!) Unfortunately, in my situation said document simply will not properly load. I managed to load it once and read it, and have since been unable to recreate the cosmic circumstance that provided the portal of access needed to read this academic article of amazement (if you can’t tell I’m a little bitter).
These difficulties beg the question, do the positives of the peer review process provide enough benefits to outweigh the fact that once the article is published it can only be viewed by those who pay to subscribe to the service, or students who will only retain the information long enough to get an ‘A’? From my perspective, while the process may guard the integrity of the academic community, it diminishes the value of the information discovered by placing the knowledge in a vacuum. Doctor Burton has a lot to say on this subject and if you would like to see his opinion check out his blog. He goes into detail about the complications of academic information in the digital age, and proposes some solutions. I have not read all of the posts yet, but I have found that the more I study at the University the more I run into this "closed loop" wall. It is aggravating!
What if Shakespeare had run into these kinds of problems when he went to read The Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland? Would we have no History Plays? (sigh) Hopefully the cosmos will turn again in my favor and I will be able to glean the information I need from this article once more, and thereby post my observations in the way I had planned. May I say to the future scholar who then attempts to trace my sources and thereby learn on their own (yes, I have heard that it does happen), I pray the universe be kind to you.
