Over the last few days I had to make some space in my home-office. While cleaning up (throwing out stuff and relocating even more stuff to the cellar) I came across my accumulation of neatly organised papers which I have collected throughout my PhD studies. There were approximately 1500 papers. All nicely printed and sorted in approximately 30 ring binders. Well, what to do with all this stuff? I haven’t looked at any of those papers for some time and to be honest, whenever I do need to look at one, I don’t go through my hard-copies, but rather look the paper up online, which is so much quicker and easier (I realise that this also depends on the subscription rights of your institution). So, what did I do? I looked through the whole mountain and picked out only the papers that you can’t get online (older papers) and some key papers that I wanted to keep in print. I found surprisingly few and ended up with a humongous pile of paper that I did not want to keep. So, I threw them out (recycling of course!).
Of course I felt bad! I had spent a lot of time reading these papers (not all of them I guess, but at least the abstracts of all) and collecting them, and now I just threw them out, like nothing. Also, the environmental issue connected to this!!! (See Anna Kushnir’s blog on the issue of science and the environment) I guess there is not much difference if I keep them on my shelves or if I throw them out, but it feels different. During all of this it came to me, that there must be many people in science who have accumulated very large amounts of printed papers, that either lie around in offices in large white paper piles, or are stacked away in some filing cabinets or folders, never to be looked at again, because pretty much all recent papers are three mouse clicks away.
I was just wondering if there are more people out there that haven’t looked at their hard copy papers in years and wondered what to do with their paper collections.
So, where is your mountain of paper hiding?
Well, AFAIK accumulating paper is not a bad thing. It´s carbon capturing. When you use recycled paper instead of paper that came from a tree (eucalyptus) plantation, you are missing an opportunity to capture more carbon. I don´t know about the ink and tonner…
Of course there are other issues that can perhaps make recycled paper more environmental-friendly overall.
Plastic gloves are something else… There is no C capturing, just the creation of garbage to be handled by future generations. Like nuclear waste, it has the side effect of creating qualified jobs for the people who will take care of all this junk in the future… (this is only partly a joke :) )
I´m finishing my master´s and I have collected only a full 15cm wide box of articles, plus some 10 books. I hate reading things on the screen, if I want to read the full article, I usually print it.
I agree, reading a printed version of a paper is easier on the eyes. I guess that is why so many people I know print everything, but the accumulation of never-to-be-read-again paper piles is amazing!
I think the key solution is to spend all your time on facebook and Nature Network instead of reading papers… So far this has been a great success!
Funny, I had this same conversation with my wife this morning. She wants me to get rid of all of them. My first response was horror – of course I am not throwing any of that away. But then I thought about it and realized I only need to go through them and keep stuff that is otherwise unavailable, ancients stuff, copies of book chapters, etc. This is what I’ll do.