| It's hard to overstate how tired the entire argument is. Doctorow feels like tweetstorms are an acceptable means of getting communication across (yikes), so maybe some things are just unbridgable. HN sounds like cranks about this. In my podunk region 2 school I have access to all the journals I want, always have as a student. I rarely need that because it's easier to Google Scholar and then just grab the paper off of someone's site, which pretty mch everyone does these days. Some of the commenters here could have written a phd in the last decade about this topic but I don't think it's the massive stopper of progress that people think it is. Billions of dollars! Wish we didn't have to bust my ass to get a portion of that, but keep beating up on the academics. |
Perhaps you are in computer science. As long as we're trading anecdotes, I went to one of the top universities in my country. I regularly came across articles that were not accessible from large professional societies such as IEEE, ACS, and SPIE. Now I work in a hospital, and they don't have subscriptions to anything non-medical! I have to go through sci-hub for access to my own papers!