Comment Re:private or public science? (Score 2, Informative) 150
This is, to put it bluntly, an extremely ignorant view.
It is now, and I'm working in science, A LOT better then it was 15 years ago. Back then you physically had to go to a library, get the articles on paper, photocopy them one by one, and then you just had a huge mess of horribly photocopied junk, with no color and hard to read illustrations and figures.
Not to talk about finding the stuff first, Pubmed and co are invaluable here and this is only possible due to the fact that scientific articles are all digitized.
I cannot justify the ridiculous prices that are being charged for single articles, (20 $ and up), however in reality nearly no one pays those. Everyone working in a somewhat scientific position will have access to most journals through the institution where they work. This means you can just download everything from your desk in perfect pdf quality, store it on your computer, full-text search it, print it etc..
When ever I come across a "Please give me 500 $ for this article" page it is usually because our intuition does not have a subscription to this journal. However usually this is no problem, because collogues from other universities will probably have access and vice versa.
Now what to do when you are not a member of a scientific institution and do not have access?
Simple, just go to the library and go sit at their computers. Or join a library and get access to their VPN/intranet
It is now, and I'm working in science, A LOT better then it was 15 years ago. Back then you physically had to go to a library, get the articles on paper, photocopy them one by one, and then you just had a huge mess of horribly photocopied junk, with no color and hard to read illustrations and figures.
Not to talk about finding the stuff first, Pubmed and co are invaluable here and this is only possible due to the fact that scientific articles are all digitized.
I cannot justify the ridiculous prices that are being charged for single articles, (20 $ and up), however in reality nearly no one pays those. Everyone working in a somewhat scientific position will have access to most journals through the institution where they work. This means you can just download everything from your desk in perfect pdf quality, store it on your computer, full-text search it, print it etc..
When ever I come across a "Please give me 500 $ for this article" page it is usually because our intuition does not have a subscription to this journal. However usually this is no problem, because collogues from other universities will probably have access and vice versa.
Now what to do when you are not a member of a scientific institution and do not have access?
Simple, just go to the library and go sit at their computers. Or join a library and get access to their VPN/intranet
