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Tuesday, March 23, 2021

No access to a 95 year old Nature paper? Normal at Maastricht University.

 Last week I learned from a PhD candidate at our Faculty of Health, Medicine, and Life sciences that we do not have access to old Nature articles. Old, as in this 1926 article:

"Access to this article via Maastricht University UL Randwyck – Media is not available."

It also suggests I can change my institution. Well, I love to become full professor and open to discussing this with other institutions, but otherwise quite happy with the BiGCaT team :)

But let this sink in. We pay SpringerNature a lot of money each year, but the deal is not great for Open Science. Because apparently we do not pay enough to read an important scientific paper (not every Nature paper is, but this one formally introduces the idea of the electron spin). Second, full Open Access journals from BioMed Central are excluded from the deal too.

So, when students want to read the important classics in their field, the have to buy access. When I ignore the discouraging button texts, I do end up with a ReadCube, but is that what we want to teach our students: "learn science, but ignore the primary literature"?


1 comment:

  1. Nothing will change as long you are buying their subscriptions. Giving them money means you are supporting them. Stop using their services and donate to Sci-Hub instead.

    ReplyDelete