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39 Comments
- inactive, on 07/07/2009, -0/+19Now if only they'd do this with college textbooks. At least my younger siblings would be able to save the roughly $5 grand required.
- rocknog, on 07/07/2009, -0/+16It's a great start, but what they really need to get on is digitizing existing journal collections. Tracking down print articles is the bane of research.
- Jaime2000, on 07/07/2009, -0/+16About time.
- Smokeydabear, on 07/07/2009, -1/+12A lot of old college professors - who have yet to learn how to operate a computer - will be bitching about this.
- AYork, on 07/07/2009, -0/+6I guess it was inevitable....I haven't read a print journal in years, but my "papers" folder on my hard drive is now just shy of half a GB. And those are just the ones I thought worth hanging on to.
And they do actually make money off this...they have for a while, in a way. It used to be (late 1990s) that if you (or more commonly your University) signed up for a subscription to whatever journal, you got the online content as a bonus. Advance publication, supplementary data, current issue, a few back issues, etc. Over the years, people have recognized how much easier it is to have access right there in the lab or at your desk, and basically don't go to the library any more. In response, most journals have dramatically expanded their online content.
Back in the early 1990s, I was a research tech. My first duty of the day was to pick up "The List", grab the cart and head over to the library to pick up all the journal articles that the people in the lab wanted. At the end of the day, I had to xerox the ones they wanted to keep and return the checked out journals. Sometimes, it was the single most time consuming thing I did in a given day.
Now, I might need something from the library once every few months, usually to track down some old reference that hasn't been digitized yet. - oo7evan, on 07/07/2009, -0/+6In grad school, a day of research at the library stack would maybe yield about 2-3 useful journal articles. A few hours of online searching might discover dozens of papers with something useful, with the added ability to cite sources faster, and track down papers cited in other papers.
- askantik, on 07/07/2009, -0/+5... Many past issues of journals are already online. Many back into the 70s and 80s... Perhaps not the ACS, but then, I'm no chemist so I wouldn't know :)
- AndrewRidgely, on 07/07/2009, -0/+5They can get a librarian or a grad student to print out all the articles for them.
- reester, on 07/07/2009, -0/+5We already get the ACS journals as online-only.
I work at a university library, and have access to the pricing for all journals we subscribe to. I actually worked on a project to determine how much money we'd be saving by switching to online-only access. It wasn't much. At all.
This isn't going to make it cheaper for the universities to subscribe, it is going to be cheaper for the publisher. And they won't start charging less, I guarantee it. More money in their pockets. - punkcat, on 07/07/2009, -1/+6too much money to be had with textbooks.
- sonnybobiche, on 07/07/2009, -0/+4If Diggers knew how much money these ***** charge for access to scholarly journals, this story would be dead and buried.
- ethanator1088, on 07/06/2009, -3/+7It should have happened 10 years ago, but i guess they did not know how to make money from it.
- zip000, on 07/07/2009, -0/+4I'm not sure what the article was getting at when it mentioned loss of ad revenue. ACS journals - at least the ones that I've seen - don't have ads, and neither do most scholarly journals in general. They are supported by their - exorbitant - subscription fees.
My library spends about $20K on subscriptions to ACS journals because it has to because our Chemistry program is accredited by the ACS. The accreditation requires subscription to ACS journals. It's a racket really. - NJank, on 07/07/2009, -1/+4oxidation rate of aluminum in a high pressure gaseous ambient has changed since the 1930's, huh? good to know. I'll be sure to reference OuijaCat in my next paper.
- Royish, on 07/07/2009, -1/+4Every single college textbook should be available online too.
- jhbarr, on 07/07/2009, -0/+3I'm sorry. A guy with a PhD in chemistry and doing research, no matter how old, should be able to figure out how to operate a computer. The older professors all knew how to operate computers in my engineering department back in the early 90's. I'm sure an older professor today can figure out how to do a literature search.
- Majora26, on 07/07/2009, -0/+2No one born before the internet knows how to make money on it. Just look at the MPAA...
- frazw, on 07/07/2009, -0/+2I bet they still charge an insane amount of money for access.
As my old boss once said, journals themselves do less and less by passing more and more of the process to the authors but still charge the same or more. - Ascus, on 07/07/2009, -0/+2But how would professors make extra money writing textbooks and getting kickbacks from publishers for selecting there books as the official one for the class?
- NJank, on 07/07/2009, -0/+1journals, not textbooks. if you were replying to one of the textbook comments, that's why there's a threaded reply button.
- jimbo92107, on 07/07/2009, -0/+1Print is dead.
Oh, wait.... - NJank, on 07/07/2009, -0/+1well, I've seen a fair numbers of materials studies that are repeating work done 30 years ago. Maybe the equipment and graphics are a bit better, but they only reference stuff from a decade ago since some journals are only available digitally back to the 90's. If you can't get full text by following google scholar links, it may as well not exist to many people.
- NJank, on 07/07/2009, -0/+1back in 2002 I spent a good week in the basement of our engineering library looking through old copies of Aluminium and ACS journals from the 40's. Nothing like manual spidering through forward and backward references in the search for a single piece of information. never did find it. will have to try again some day.
- P522, on 07/07/2009, -1/+2"If information isn't online, it may as well not exist." Huh? What a premise!
- mdp8889, on 07/07/2009, -0/+1Theyve had all of their journals online for years, but if people will purchase the paper ones then why not.. So.. Well atleast with ACS journals you always have access
- NJank, on 07/07/2009, -0/+1"I might need something from the library once every few months,"
most places with technical libraries will take a document request, and the librarian will first look through what they have, then handle the ILL for you. Ours will even scan it a faxed document and send it to your inbox. Universities are a completely different story. But then again, that's what grad students are for.
Also, many publishers make 'articles in press' available to subscribers from the 'manuscript received' to 'corrected proof' stages. With the lead time on quality journal articles being over a year, the early peek at data is a big plus in competitive research environments. - Royish, on 07/08/2009, -0/+1I dug you up for bringing up a huge problem with downloadable anything. No resale value but still retaining the high prices.
Companies will keep trying to milk the old system for cash, and temporarily remain successful largely due to consumer ignorance. That ends when people say... "uhhh this had next to no manufacturing or shippings costs."
The fact is data is only worth a fraction of the amount it used to be due to how easy it is to obtain it. - DrSnugglebunny, on 07/07/2009, -0/+1Some of the biggest journals have been mulling this too; I know some editors. It will happen soon enough. Print will become an optional thing you can pay extra for; not the opposite.
A temporary strategy some journals are already taking (e.g. Nature) is to put lots of extra stuff online that used to (even 1-2yrs ago) be in the main paper, e.g. large parts of the Methods section. - inactive, on 07/07/2009, -0/+1***** em. :)
- dbeldowicz, on 07/07/2009, -0/+1Is this really a surprise to anyone? With Kindles, eBook Readers, smart phones and NetBooks who needs all those books...
- jhbarr, on 07/07/2009, -0/+1The National Library of Medicine has been working on this for years.
- Cartman86, on 07/08/2009, -0/+1lol I can just see more idiots coming in and trying to polute the information. This is the kind of stuff that the creationists attempt to do. Of course they will never be taken serously as all an real scientist will have to do is read the reports and know they are crap.
- MisterEThoughts, on 07/08/2009, -0/+1They should do it half and half?
- shibagarden, on 07/07/2009, -0/+1A lot of them are. They're not any cheaper and your access code is good for only a single semester. So no selling 'em back at the end of the class.
- goddardc, on 07/08/2009, -0/+0Print is dead, vive la revolution technologique!
this should have happened years ago. We had the technology, but conservatives who are terrified of change and learning new things just slow down the people who want the most efficient, sensible methods.
On a related note, does anyone else get completely demoralised when government shores up the media houses? It's dying for a reason! Low demand means people don't WANT it to survive!
Goodbye tangible print- and good riddance. - ZippidyDoo, on 07/07/2009, -1/+1Start ordering international editions, and used/older editions. Sometimes you can even make money if you're smart about it.
- TheBifman, on 07/07/2009, -3/+2I hate being a grammar nazi, but a Little More attention To Which words We capitalize Would make Titles More Understandable, No?
- seravi, on 07/07/2009, -1/+0I believe the title's capitalization makes more sense than yours. Well beside the word "over", at least only preposition and conjunctions are in lower cases.
- OuijaCat, on 07/07/2009, -4/+1"If information isn't online, it may as well not exist." ?!?
Perhaps a more accurate assessment would state:
If it isn't online by now, it's probably obsolete (at least as far as Science is concerned).
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