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Labs typically don't pay for journal subscriptions. University libraries and academic departments subscribe as a benefit to the collective university community
by sswaner 11y ago
Labs typically don't pay for journal subscriptions. University libraries and academic departments subscribe as a benefit to the collective university community.
A per-article subscription/purchase model would be more appropriate if we consider that the cost of peer-provided knowledge is a hard cost similar to reagents and buffers.
But I personally agree with Open Access advocates, cost should be as close to free as reasonably possible.
- URSpider94 11y agoThat wasn't true when I was a grad student. My lab had an individual (paper) subscription to a couple of critical journals in our field. Many individuals subscribe to "Nature", which is arguably the most prestigious general sciences journal out there. The landscape may have changed in the intervening years, with blanket institutional subscriptions making paper subscriptions irrelevant. I also suspect that, much like with albums and music, nobody actually reads a journal cover to cover these days, instead they are consuming the papers they want in a random-access fashion as a collection of PDF's.