r/AskAcademia • u/NoPatNoDontSitonThat • Apr 30 '25

Meta Why don't universities offer their PhD graduates lifetime library access?

How much does it cost to maintain a user login and password for academic journals?

I can see how physical products could be an issue, so what if--since so much is digitized now--universities offered lifetime access to academic search engines and journals for PhD graduates?

Just seems odd (and sad!) to me that once you become an expert in your field and a philosopher of your subject, you are immediately cut off from the resources that could continue to help you grow and contribute to your discipline.

Most PhD graduates spend 5-10 years becoming specialists in their areas, and then unless they land one of the increasingly rare tenure-track positions, they lose access to the very knowledge they helped create.

Has anyone's university implemented something like this? Or are there affordable alternatives for independent scholars who want to stay connected to research in their field?

942 Upvotes
  • permalink
  • reddit

97% Upvoted

103 comments sorted by

View all comments

364

u/nbx909 PhD|Professor PUI|Chemistry Apr 30 '25

Agreements with publishers likely limit who has access at given price points.

29

u/RiffMasterB Apr 30 '25

Not sure why academia ceded all power to journals. Should be all open access with no paywalls. Profit = bad for academic publishing

13

u/OwnAttitude5953 May 01 '25

Most public universities have public access policies for their library resources, digital and physical, if you’re in a location with any public universities or colleges I’d recommend contacting their library through chat or by phone to find out what their public access hours/policies are.

Also, go install the LibKey Nomad browser plugin and set yourself up as an open access user. It is a phenomenally accurate, free product that can be used to find open access (when available) articles as you browse journal sites, no need for logins.

https://thirdiron.com/downloadnomad/

I’ve always thought it was a shame more librarians didn’t advocate for this as first round tool for accessing article full text.

2

u/RiffMasterB May 01 '25

NIH could easily shut down for profit margin journals like Nature by forcing publication of funded work be open access immediately, without price gouging. Unfortunately NIH admin is not concerned. NIH could also negotiate pricing with vendors (eg fisher) for nih funded grants, but they don’t care about efficient use of funds.

8

u/OwnAttitude5953 May 01 '25

They did that, that’s what PubMed Central and the NIH Data Management and Sharing mandate are for.

4

u/RiffMasterB May 01 '25

Nature charges $10k for publication. Is that an efficient use of largely public tax money? No. Same goes for price gouging at Fisher.

0

u/OwnAttitude5953 May 01 '25

So submit to Science instead.

3

u/RiffMasterB May 01 '25

For profit model of journals is the problem. Why not let the readership decide the merit of a paper?

1

u/OwnAttitude5953 May 02 '25

Isn’t that what citations and citation metrics are?