Follow-up to saving technical journals.....

[poltr1]

In the last couple of days since my last post on the topic, I found out that ACM, IEEE, and the IEEE Computer Society all have digital libraries online.....for members only or for a monthly or annual fee. I believe their libraries contain all their back issues. I'm sure of this for ACM; I'm not so sure for IEEE. (Links included mostly for my reference.)

Communications of the ACM
IEEE Spectrum
IEEE-CS Computer

Another reason for me to ditch the paper versions of the magazines, which mostly consist of technical research papers. Most of these papers won't be read, used, or needed by me.

Has it strictly been my experience that employers don't support employees' activity in professional organizations? In all the companies I've worked for, they've been neutral to indifferent about my membership in such organizations. That's another reason why I let my memberships lapse.

Comments

[robin-june.livejournal.com]

Technical journals may or may not be working the same as Scientific journals are now; I wouldn't know.
But here is the lowdown on what scientific journals have come to:

In order to keep profitability in an age where articles are accessed electronically, scientific journal publishers are requiring subscriptions for access. Big institutions like mine (Ohio State University) can typically afford to pay for many, many titles, though the actual shelves in the actual libraries have stopped filling up with hardcopies. Individual subscriptions are prohibitively expensive, and some uber-publishers with many journal titles in their stable will charge $35 for a single article's pdf (yes, ScienceDirect, I'm looking at you). That's why on the scientific-community part of my lj flist, there are a lot of people requesting articles, since they come from Less-Than-Enormous institutions. Much of the time, I can help them. Once I leave OSU, I won't have any access myself.

The economic model of the science journal has turned so upside down, that Cell made me an offer 3-5 years ago: since my institution paid an online subscription, I was eligible for a free hardcopy subscription. I took them up on it, and despite the poundage of paper I ain't sorry yet: there are previews, explanations for those not in the sub-sub-sub-specialty, and additional synopsis figures in each issue for its journal articles. This material is almost impossible to find in search results on line, and I have found it extremely helpful when I needed to lead a discussion on the article itself. Cell Press has recently asked me to go electronic on my subscription, but at the moment, I've got more shelf space than disk space, so I'm dragging my heels.

And as regards professional organization's expensive membership fees? My boss can use his grant money to pay for his (and is encouraged to by OSU). My grad student coworkers get reduced rates, and I dunno if grant money pays for them. But staff like me? Naw. No price break, and no grant funds for it.