4 ms·

If you are doing academic work you can easily apply for membership to any of those libraries Warning: Pet peeve alert. Scientists routinely complain that the

If you are doing academic work you can easily apply for membership to any of those libraries Warning: Pet peeve alert. Scientists routinely complain that the public unfairly brands them as isolated ivory-tower eggheads whose work is too insular and rarefied to have any relevance to the real world. They also complain that the general public has a poor idea of how science actually works: People often view it as some kind of alternative religion in which the priests stand in front of documentary cameras wearing white coats and handing down dogma. Then these scientists turn around and publish most of their actual writing and almost one hundred percent of their data, data-driven reasoning, and detailed experimental design in journals which are prohibitively expensive to read unless you're currently affiliated with a university. Which is, in turn, exorbitantly expensive, either in cash or in opportunity cost. Trying to understand science without reading the primary literature is like trying to understand jazz by reading the New York Times and watching the occasional Ken Burns documentary. Reviewers do write a lot about jazz, and they go on an on about how important and highbrow it all is, but if you haven't actually listened to a jazz piece for more than two minutes you're never going to get the point. Jazz is about the music. Science is about the detailed methods and the data and the literature.

elvirs 16y ago
you don't have to be a student or pay the university to use the library.
- mechanical_fish 16y ago
  You have obviously never been to Harvard, where in fact you do. (You can also work at Harvard and get a library card as a perk. I often contemplate this fact.) The good news is that MIT has a much more awesome library and you can, in fact, turn up in person at MIT as a civilian and read copies of Nature. Of course, you have to make the time to do that. The parking is tricky, so you'd best ride the train. Even in the Boston area I have yet to find a neighborhood library with a Nature subscription. If, in fact, you know where I can legally get access to, say, the Nature and Science journals without either paying hundreds of dollars a year or physically traveling to the local college library please, please paste the instructions here.
  - elvirs 16y ago
    ok this is what you do: you go to the library only once, get a membership card and a username/password for electronic use. and use that username/password to access electronic resources of that library from anywhere. i hope this helps. edit:grammar.
    - djacobs 16y ago
      Harvard, for one, doesn't let you do that. You can't even get into most of their library buildings without an ID.
    - bugsy 16y ago
      Can you name some academic libraries that offer free membership cards to the general public that enable web access to journals? I've never heard of this, and the institutions I am personally familiar with certainly don't allow this. At the closest three universities to where I am now, a library card for the public costs $500-$1000 a year. This was also the case in other cities I have lived in. If there are research libraries for which this is not the case I would love to know about them. Obviously from your post you have found some, so if you would name them it would help others.
    - dagw 16y ago
      The membership card my local university library offers to the general public does not allow remote access to any electronic resources. You have to be a student or employee to get that.
- p_nathan 16y ago
  Disagree. With the move towards electronic articles, one needs a login to access the computers at the library or to read the articles. Sorry. :(
archgoon 16y ago
If you live in California (or ar visiting), all UC libraries are publicly available, and typically have guest login access, which allows you to access the online resources. You can access the journals there, with no affiliation with any university. You'll have to actually physically walk into the libraries, which some campuses make it harder than necessary (mostly due to bad parking planning, see UCSC), but campuses like Berkeley are very easy to walk onto.
tensor 16y ago
I would guess that all scientists would rather their work be distributed for free. Certainly all that I know feel this way. The problem, as usual, comes down to money. To publish in an open access journal, it can cost over a thousand dollars for just a single article. With grant money being tight, and university administration pushing for meaningless metrics such as "number of papers published" to rank professors, publishing in open access journals can add up. Furthermore, many areas of study do not yet have good open access options. Putting up content on a public website may sound great, but is not an option. Despite the problems with peer review, it remains the best and only way to both vet published work as well as uphold some level of quality. The public does not help with the financial aspects either. While the public feels that managers in successful companies fully deserve outrageously high salaries, and that those companies themselves deserve incredible profit margins, the same sentiments do not apply to academic research. It seems that public sentiment is that academics deserve to live in squalor while working for free. Graduate students, who do the bulk of the grunt work of science, already get paid barely above the poverty line. Of course, to the public, these are lazy students with too much free time. In short, the public always wants more from science while paying less. You may argue that it is this way because people don't have a choice in the matter, they must pay taxes. Fair enough, but if science was funded by industry, instead of journals with pay walls, the public would have absolutely no access to research for any amount of money. I, for one, feel that is a much worse outcome.

elvirs 16y ago

you don't have to be a student or pay the university to use the library.

mechanical_fish 16y ago
You have obviously never been to Harvard, where in fact you do. (You can also work at Harvard and get a library card as a perk. I often contemplate this fact.) The good news is that MIT has a much more awesome library and you can, in fact, turn up in person at MIT as a civilian and read copies of Nature. Of course, you have to make the time to do that. The parking is tricky, so you'd best ride the train. Even in the Boston area I have yet to find a neighborhood library with a Nature subscription. If, in fact, you know where I can legally get access to, say, the Nature and Science journals without either paying hundreds of dollars a year or physically traveling to the local college library please, please paste the instructions here.
- elvirs 16y ago
  ok this is what you do: you go to the library only once, get a membership card and a username/password for electronic use. and use that username/password to access electronic resources of that library from anywhere. i hope this helps. edit:grammar.
  - djacobs 16y ago
    Harvard, for one, doesn't let you do that. You can't even get into most of their library buildings without an ID.
  - bugsy 16y ago
    Can you name some academic libraries that offer free membership cards to the general public that enable web access to journals? I've never heard of this, and the institutions I am personally familiar with certainly don't allow this. At the closest three universities to where I am now, a library card for the public costs $500-$1000 a year. This was also the case in other cities I have lived in. If there are research libraries for which this is not the case I would love to know about them. Obviously from your post you have found some, so if you would name them it would help others.
  - dagw 16y ago
    The membership card my local university library offers to the general public does not allow remote access to any electronic resources. You have to be a student or employee to get that.
p_nathan 16y ago
Disagree. With the move towards electronic articles, one needs a login to access the computers at the library or to read the articles. Sorry. :(

archgoon 16y ago

If you live in California (or ar visiting), all UC libraries are publicly available, and typically have guest login access, which allows you to access the online resources. You can access the journals there, with no affiliation with any university. You'll have to actually physically walk into the libraries, which some campuses make it harder than necessary (mostly due to bad parking planning, see UCSC), but campuses like Berkeley are very easy to walk onto.

tensor 16y ago

I would guess that all scientists would rather their work be distributed for free. Certainly all that I know feel this way. The problem, as usual, comes down to money. To publish in an open access journal, it can cost over a thousand dollars for just a single article. With grant money being tight, and university administration pushing for meaningless metrics such as "number of papers published" to rank professors, publishing in open access journals can add up. Furthermore, many areas of study do not yet have good open access options. Putting up content on a public website may sound great, but is not an option. Despite the problems with peer review, it remains the best and only way to both vet published work as well as uphold some level of quality. The public does not help with the financial aspects either. While the public feels that managers in successful companies fully deserve outrageously high salaries, and that those companies themselves deserve incredible profit margins, the same sentiments do not apply to academic research. It seems that public sentiment is that academics deserve to live in squalor while working for free. Graduate students, who do the bulk of the grunt work of science, already get paid barely above the poverty line. Of course, to the public, these are lazy students with too much free time. In short, the public always wants more from science while paying less. You may argue that it is this way because people don't have a choice in the matter, they must pay taxes. Fair enough, but if science was funded by industry, instead of journals with pay walls, the public would have absolutely no access to research for any amount of money. I, for one, feel that is a much worse outcome.