[slr555]

Stunningly in NYC there is not a single medical library that offers journal access open to the general public. The only publicly accessible medical library has been described to me as primarily a "historical" library without journal access.

Columbia and NYU's medical libraries are only open to medical school students and faculty. No undergraduates. No alumni. The New York Public Library has surprisingly good online access but is missing a number of important journals and current issues are often delayed by agreement for several months.

If in this nation's largest city, current healthcare knowledge is bulkheaded from public access there is a serious problem. Whatever the publisher's rights these knowledge and information asymmetries must not be allowed to continue.

[chrisseaton]

Aren't these journal articles, like all formal publications, a matter of public record? I don't know where the United States' libraries of record are, but you should be able to go to one of them and ask to see a copy of anything at all published ever in the US.

[no_flags]

I guess the Library of Congress is the closest thing. They are open to the public and have a huge collection but it's not everything ever published in the US. I'm not sure if you can walk in and request to see a medical journal.

I wish municipal public libraries would provide access to scientific journals.

[dhimes]

I find that...offensive. It's infuriatingly wrong.

[itsgrimetime]

Mind expounding on why?

[lugg]

> Agrees, badly.

[jrochkind1]

You don't necessarily have to be at a medical library to have access to the same online journal content that a medical library has. I'd look for a high-quality general-purpose library at a public university that offers on-site access to electronic subscriptions to the public.

NYU and Columbia are both private universities of course. Does NYC even have a large top-tier public university? Hmm.

NYPL gives you access to more online paywalled journal subscriptions than nearly any other public library in the country though, you're lucky for that.

(If you're looking for print archives of journals, medical libraries are at the forefront of getting rid of historical print journal collections, because the usage of them was so tiny. The vast majority of medical researchers simply don't use historical print journal collections anymore, and there are non-trivial costs associated with keeping tons of bound journals getting almost no use...)

I am not arguing with your basic assertion that in America as a whole public access to paywalled academic research is a problem. I agree. (Apparently not just America, as OP is about Germany, where universities are collectively trying to _do_ something about it in a way we aren't really here).

The shift to electronic instead of print content doesn't help -- it's easier to simply give the public access to the physical environment to access stacks of bound journals (if you want to; or are required to give the public _some_ access as a federal depository library, sometimes easier to give them _all_ access), than it is to give them on-site access to electronic subscriptions (which you gotta get your vendors to agree is allowed, and then provide technological support for).

There are ways that the "digital revolution" has actually _hurt_ access to information, ironically.

It is a problem. But some (not all) university libraries, especially public university libraries, are trying. For instance, specifically insisting on public on-site access being included in their licenses from vendors. It's worth looking around and not assuming it's got to be a _medical_ library to get access to the online content. If you can't find it in NYC, it's probably even worse other places (although NYC's lack of major _public_ university probably doesn't help).

And then there's always sci-hub...

I certainly agree in principle that it ALL ought to just be in the commons, and not something only available through the richest universities (whether or not they then "share" it).

</a librarian software engineer>

[slr555]

You are right. NYPL is about the best public library one could hope for and much is available from home login. City College is one option to look at but I don't think they have a medical library. I am an NYU alum and had extensive conversations with the alumni office and library and both confirmed that access to med school library resources was a non-starter. I guess its a big issue for me because people need information to make informed healthcare decisions and so much medical research has a component of public funding. Thanks for your thoughtful comment.

[jrochkind1]

Sometimes 'alumni access' (that you can use from anywhere with alumni credentials) is less than the total online licensed resource access for current students/faculty -- because the university generally needs to pay extra for "alumni access" to particular licensed resources.

But sometimes the total licensed resource access is available for _on-site_ public users, even if not alumni, because that may be included in the licenses.

I know you can't enter the medical library, but have you checked if you can get access to the resources you need on-site at another NYU library, that may allow the public to walk-in and use licensed resources from on-site workstations?

There may be resources licensed only to the medical library you can't get access to there -- but there may not be. Sometimes the particular people you are talking to asking questions don't understand the total licensing landscape of the university, especially if you are talking to people at the alumni office rather than librarians (but even every librarian may not, if you're not talking to someone whose job is centered on online resources; it gets terribly complicated, and libraries haven't always been great at keeping track of it and keeping it sane; the vendors' demands and irrational and enormously expensive contracts don't really help).

[schuetze]

Have you tried accessing the publications via the on-campus computers in the normal undergraduate libraries? I don't think you need to be in a medical building to have access to the online medical journals.

[asdff]

I guarantee anyone enrolled or alumni with credentials at Columbia and NYU can log into just about any journal on the school network on campus or with the school proxy anywhere in the world.

Laymen aren't going to be reading from these journals, they are really too technical to be informative. It's like having people without CS knowledge read through your source code and saying "Boom. Open source." By the time you explain someone the necessary conceptual ideas to understand these dense papers, you will be basically giving them a B.S. in biology.

The real crime with these journals is that it can cost thousands to have the privilege of your paper published. That's thousands that could have been spent on more reagents, equipment, or salaries to do even more science. Instead, you pay the toll troll, and you lost another x% of your grant earmarked by the government to do science.

[Vinnl]

You're stretching the definition of laymen here - often people with plenty of expertise, such as GP's, don't have access to the latest research, or have to make do with the access of interns. For examples, see https://whoneedsaccess.org

[matwood]

> Laymen aren't going to be reading from these journals, they are really too technical to be informative.

You're right. We should lock up all knowledge to only those are who are not laymen. Want to learn CS, go to school. Clearly the only way to learn is to be taught. /s

[icelancer]

> Laymen aren't going to be reading from these journals, they are really too technical to be informative.

This is probably the single most offensive thing I've read on this site.

I am a college dropout layperson who got a 0.0 GPA in my last semester enrolled in a liberal arts college who went on to replicate complicated experiments in sports science from these so-called "too technical to be informative" journals. A decade or so later, and now I run a fairly successful (30+ people employed) small business primarily because of the fact that I based my work on early publications I was lucky enough to get access through from students at the local public university.

With Sci-Hub, many terrible steps have been cut out of the process, and Elbakyan deserves Nobel Prize consideration for her work.

Meanwhile, your gatekeeping comments are elitist and only serve to increase inequality in all forms in this country (and the developing world, where academic freedom is truly useful to break paradigms).

Open source software need not be 100% understandable for it to be useful. We do business with as many vendors as possible that open source their code and work not because I am interested in validating their work, but because of the signal it sends that they feel comfortable and open enough to share their core products.

I hope you rethink your positions on these matters, because they're pretty offensive.

[Zak]

Being a layman in more fields than I am an expert, and having a habit of reading journal articles in various fields when the mainstream press reports on their findings, I have to disagree.

Of course, I can't (usually) read a journal article in a field in which I am a layman and understand it well enough to attempt to replicate its findings, critique its methodology, or make a follow-on contribution to the field. That's not the only value one might extract from a journal article.

What I can do is figure out if the mainstream press reporting on the article actually matches what the researchers found. The most common issue I see in mainstream press reporting is over-broad conclusions like "X is a cure for cancer" instead of "X is a 10% more effective treatment for Y type of cancer". Correlation reported as causation when the research did not draw such a conclusion is also annoyingly common.

[ineedasername]

what about the hundreds of thousands of doctors in their own practices that would like to keep current? I can tell you with the absolute certainty of experience that alumni do not retain such privileges at all schools. And when they do, it can be limited to in person access: not possible when you live hours or more away from your almer mater.

[wisty]

The world isn't made up of just laymen and students. There's also professionals. In some cases employers will pay, or individuals can pay, but journal payment schemes aren't really set up for this.