That 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 subscr

That 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.