An overlooked potential benefit of OA: increased quality of science journalism, which in turn should improve public science awareness/literacy, resulting in higher demand for quality science journalism... a virtuous circle. - Bill Hooker

Will give it a listen when I get home. - Graham Steel

You won't hear anything, it's text. :-) - Bill Hooker

Naw, I mean the Nature podcast Björn refers to.. - Graham Steel

Key passage; "Some journalists tell me they don't have access to any journals and have to go by the press-releases! No way any journalist can be a watchdog without information. So what can the journalists of today do who want to investigate? They have to call the scientists up. Either the scientists who did the study in question, or colleagues, to get other opinions. All of this is, of course, the far worse option than to read the literature and form your own opinion." - Bora Zivkovic

This post http://scienceblogs.com/pharyng... reminded me of another reason science journalists need to have access and learn how to use Google Scholar, PubMed and Web of Knowledge: so they can find out what is going on in the lagre body of science, not just the few that bubble up for whatever weird reason to the more general media. Science doesn't happen in the news. If you want to know what's going on inside, you need to dig. - Björn Brembs

Of course, sometimes you can't look at the paper being trumpeted because it isn't actually available yet, even behind a paywall... - Chris Rowan