Subscription services have come to dominate academic publishing. Subscription-based services used for academic purposes are commonly referred to as research databases. They are particularly useful for retrieving articles in academic journals, repositories, archives, or other group of scientific or other articles. Academic journals consist of present original research, review articles, and book reviews in different scholarly disciplines. In academic journals, new research can be introduced and critiqued, just as old research can also be critiqued (Wysocki). So, it is easy to see why these research databases are an important academic tool. Scholarly journals are held to a high esteem and seen as the benchmark of academic excellence. It is according
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This is caused by the prices of these materials and the need for institutions to be selective about the content they purchase, due to budget constraints. Kenneth Goldsmith, in his essay “If it Doesn’t Exist on the Internet, It Doesn’t Exist,” bemoans the lack of quality material available to those who need it. He tells the story of how one of the readers of Ubuweb, his open-access website, was surprised at the difference between the amount and quality of the content in her library (which is in a small Texas town) compared to the materials on Ubuweb. This shortage in resources in libraries, he believes, is due to the fact that libraries are not able to acquire the enough quality material prepared by scholars and academics, due to the fact that most of these materials are only accessible through certain subscription services; subscription services like Lenux, ProQuest or Factivia, operated by academic publishers. He further notes that even a major city like New York, which he resides in, has incredibly deficient public libraries. People, in order to access proper material, frequent Barnes and Nobles, who themselves are operating under market-driven …show more content…
He believes that hefty subscription fees for journals are blocking scientific progress, and says that even academics struggle to have full access to suitable literature. His discontent grew in the late 1990s, when he was studying the yeast genome – a field that overlaps with the human genome – which had 200 journals publishing related research. He could not access most of the material because of the excessive subscription barriers. His experience during this period led him to the conclusion that scholarly journals be free and accessible to everyone on the Web (Wysocki). While this may sound like the raving of a radical, Dr. Eisen is a well-known and respected computational
This is caused by the prices of these materials and the need for institutions to be selective about the content they purchase, due to budget constraints. Kenneth Goldsmith, in his essay “If it Doesn’t Exist on the Internet, It Doesn’t Exist,” bemoans the lack of quality material available to those who need it. He tells the story of how one of the readers of Ubuweb, his open-access website, was surprised at the difference between the amount and quality of the content in her library (which is in a small Texas town) compared to the materials on Ubuweb. This shortage in resources in libraries, he believes, is due to the fact that libraries are not able to acquire the enough quality material prepared by scholars and academics, due to the fact that most of these materials are only accessible through certain subscription services; subscription services like Lenux, ProQuest or Factivia, operated by academic publishers. He further notes that even a major city like New York, which he resides in, has incredibly deficient public libraries. People, in order to access proper material, frequent Barnes and Nobles, who themselves are operating under market-driven …show more content…
He believes that hefty subscription fees for journals are blocking scientific progress, and says that even academics struggle to have full access to suitable literature. His discontent grew in the late 1990s, when he was studying the yeast genome – a field that overlaps with the human genome – which had 200 journals publishing related research. He could not access most of the material because of the excessive subscription barriers. His experience during this period led him to the conclusion that scholarly journals be free and accessible to everyone on the Web (Wysocki). While this may sound like the raving of a radical, Dr. Eisen is a well-known and respected computational