Science Journals

I’m sitting on the internet right now trying to do research on my article. More specifically, I’m trying to get access to a number of journal articles written by the same people who did the research I’m supposed to write about, but then after they completed the one I’m supposed to be discussing.

The conclusion I’ve come to, so far, is that I’m going to have to pay about 30 US per article to get the articles. It might be possible to get them cheaper, but I don’t know how and I don’t have a great deal of time to find out either.

Of course, if I was a student right now I wouldn’t have to pay a dime, because both of the universities in Amsterdam will no doubt have the journals in their database. I’d have free access to the journals to do my research and write a more in depth report about the article I’m supposed to be discussing.

But I’m not a student, nor am I rich enough to really go around splashing cash on research articles that might very well not be terribly useful to me in the long run. So what’s left for me to do? Find illicit copies, of course. Hopefully some anarchist somewhere decided that it was horrible that journals dare charge us poor sods that much for access to a single article and therefore put the entire journal I’m trying to find online for free. So far I’ve found a couple of psychology journals online (and I’m downloading them as we speak. You never know when they might be useful!), but not the one I’m looking for.

Not too surprising really, as those people that are interested in the type of reading I’m interested in are generally not of the anarchistic persuasion. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say that people don’t really think they are helping the anarchistic movement (an oxymoron to begin with) by putting psychology journals online for free. They’d be right, as me reading these articles will not help anybody but me (and I’m certainly no anarchist), but nonetheless you’d think they’d be a bit more empathic towards struggling individuals like myself.

Why are these journals so bloody expensive anyway? How can researchers look the common people in the eye when they charge prohibitively large sums for their journals? I thought science was all about helping everybody, but instead it seems to be very much a matter of helping only those in the ivory tower – or those rich enough to pay the entry fee.

The only open source journal I found charged the authors instead of the readers; which is also ridiculous. Why can’t it just be free? Why does anybody need to be charged for making research available? Who the hell decided that discovery had to be so damned expensive?