On Thu, 13 Nov 2014, Keith Lofstrom wrote: > For now, Oregon Health Sciences University, Washington State, and the > University of Washington still permit visitors access to their online > collections, but this is expensive and could disappear. Worse, common-mode > information system vulnerabilities at the big four could wipe out much of > the academic corpus. If the lights are blinking on a backup drive during a > restore, is that actually a restore, or an erasure?
Keith, FWIW, the Multnomah County Library has an outstanding interlibrary loan system that quickly finds research journal articles as PDF files and provides them free of charge. Many of these I can download directly from journals available in JSTOR and other databases to which the library subscribes. I believe that even Washington County residents can use MCL. My interests are not physics or computers, but aquatic ecology, statistics, hydrology, and related subjects. Many of the journals in these fields (and in the medical/health fields) have to provide free access to published articles within a short time of coming out on paper. That's a requirement of the federal grant research funding. Then there are on-line journals such as PLoS, Public Library of Science, that publish articles and raw data under the Creative Commons license. > Yes, electronic journals are convenient. But copies should be widely > distibuted: purchase the content once, watermarked perhaps, and keep a > copy on your local institutional hardware, forever. What's worse, IMNSHO, is that paper has so much greater longevity than the ever-changing digital storage media and formats. Sure, paper can get soaked with water or burned, but the same fates can occur to digital storage media. Paper's good, but control of the printed scientific output by a few publishers who charge obscene subscription and reprint rates for research results funded by tax dollars is just plain wrong. Rich _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list PLUG@lists.pdxlinux.org http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
