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Great News!!! Former Academic Systems Librarian for a college of around 1,000 students. We paid $50,000 annually to access our journals 10 years ago. They weren

by baldfat 11y ago

Great News!!! Former Academic Systems Librarian for a college of around 1,000 students. We paid $50,000 annually to access our journals 10 years ago. They weren't even the new Journals but ones that were a few months to a year old. What a money racket it was. I was also in Grad School (Historical Theology) at the time and I personally boycotted any articles that were not Open Sourced and Free Access. It was hard and I had to talk with my Professors before I did that and well sometimes I just couldn't find research and break my rule BUT I think I was at around 95% of the time faithful to my pledge. It was IMPOSSIBLE for my MLS (Masters in Library Science) those suckers were locked tight back than. Librarians almost always equal the keepers of copyright and withholding resources (I don't get it still except for job security or fear).

dogma1138 11y ago
That's actually on the cheaper side, journals especially upto date ones are pretty non-existent in the public library space anymore, I remember when I was in highschool you could actually go the the Uni library and get access to material regardless of you being a student there or not but they've also restricted access to academic journals and data-bases to students only. And if you aren't an academic well that access is pretty much out of your reach at all, some won't even allow you to pay if you don't belong to an academic institution or just scam you for even more access (seen 800$ access fees vs 175$ for an edu account), so unless you work for an employer runs it's own library you are completely screwed which is just beyond stupid. Journals don't fund research, most of them don't even take care of the peer review process any more, the writers of the paper aren't getting paid squat, and they just milk you more and more each year. If they want to continue to sell hard copies they can go a head, but the cost of publishing online today is zero, and before some yells bandwidth this and bandwidth that I'm pretty sure that Google and Wikimedia Foundation would gladly take care of the costs. Considering how much higher education costs, universities and colleges should also be mandated to open their libraries to the public for free, sure some services like study rooms can be either restricted to students only or have a charge for non-students but I really don't understand why basic thing as library and even non-lab lecture access shouldn't be available to the public. I've used to sneak to interesting lectures quite a bit before every school started mandating 78 forms of ID and a retina scan to use the water fountain...

by baldfat 11y ago

dogma1138 11y ago

That's actually on the cheaper side, journals especially upto date ones are pretty non-existent in the public library space anymore, I remember when I was in highschool you could actually go the the Uni library and get access to material regardless of you being a student there or not but they've also restricted access to academic journals and data-bases to students only. And if you aren't an academic well that access is pretty much out of your reach at all, some won't even allow you to pay if you don't belong to an academic institution or just scam you for even more access (seen 800$ access fees vs 175$ for an edu account), so unless you work for an employer runs it's own library you are completely screwed which is just beyond stupid. Journals don't fund research, most of them don't even take care of the peer review process any more, the writers of the paper aren't getting paid squat, and they just milk you more and more each year. If they want to continue to sell hard copies they can go a head, but the cost of publishing online today is zero, and before some yells bandwidth this and bandwidth that I'm pretty sure that Google and Wikimedia Foundation would gladly take care of the costs. Considering how much higher education costs, universities and colleges should also be mandated to open their libraries to the public for free, sure some services like study rooms can be either restricted to students only or have a charge for non-students but I really don't understand why basic thing as library and even non-lab lecture access shouldn't be available to the public. I've used to sneak to interesting lectures quite a bit before every school started mandating 78 forms of ID and a retina scan to use the water fountain...