5) The pay-for journals can still be accessed physically if one has an
inter-libary card and lives within an hour or so of a big institutional
library.? But this imposes many environmental costs over electronic access, e.g.
reader travel, more paper production, bigger buildings for storage space, energy
use by the library, photocopying costs.? It must be more planet-friendly to use
a bit of electricity at office/home, but this is the more expensive option. It's
also a lot more time consuming for the user and hence not good for research
output.
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lately, there has been a trend in the US (though i don' know if this is only
limited to universities with resources) to provide articles in electronic form
(e.g. scanned PDF) when they are requested through interlibrary loans....this is
a welcome move in view of paper wastage (especially because most libraries
generally send them as one-sided photocopies)....i have personally also stopped
printing articles and read them directly from my computer monitor (though i can
see some people having problems with not being able to do that either because of
habit or the inability to make notes).....
i would also recommend (at the cost of offending journal and book publishers)
putting your own publications online - either on your own website or through
this website (http://www.scribd.com/) i recently discovered (and downloaded a
useful publication from).....
cheers,
deb.
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clark university, worcester, ma, usa
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