User: rocket_d00d

Re:South Korea

On: Comparing Internet Cafe Rates Worldwide

Over here in Oslo, I see lots of Internet cafés and they're almost always empty.

The "porn booths" some of them have installed seems to be frequently visited, though :-)

Re:a good start

On: Nature Debate on Open Scientific Journals

Today, the scientist/the author has to pay the journal to have his/her works published (plus, you cannot publish without handing over the copyright and your firstborn to the journal). Then the readers must pay for access to the journals, be it on paper or electronically. Plus, one has to pay for access to science index databases like ISI to search the scientific literature effectively. To participate in the "scientific debate" in the journals, you really must be able to afford all three, which becomes very expensive if you want to include the must-have prestigious journal like Nature and Science. For the past two years I have been working at a research institute that does not have access to a citation index database, and believe me, it was a pain in a certain part of the anatomy not to be able to do effective and exhaustive literature searches :(

Scientific journals in electronic format are definitely a Good Thing and a must-have for any serious university or research institution. However, getting the journal on paper offers the subscriber one very big advantage, namely that one still has access to the paper journals already received after terminating a subscription. Not so with the electronic versions, where you lose all access, even to the volumes you already have paid subscription fees for. If all you can afford is the electronic subscription to a journal, you cannot stop the subscription as long as it is on these terms. Perhaps good for the journal, but definitely very bad for the subscribers. Let's hope this debate will bring about some change in the distribution practices.