AlphaBlog

Slow Web Access

Searching the web again tonight for online references. I find it annoying that you cannot access many journals without a subscription, even ten years after publication. What is the point of publication if people can't actually read the article! I really appreciate the idea that PLoS has developed. Everyone has access to the journal from the get-go! Hey, there we go, aren't we supposed to be spreading this information around for everyone's benefit? Turns out that this is not really the case. Most publishing is done to benefit only the publishing house. Fees continue to increase, while access remains ridiculously limited.

Another annoyance this evening has been the horrible web interface designs of many of these on-line journal access sites. You have to wade through lots of loaded garbage, often requiring loading more than one page to get to the article. Now, in Safari that sucks, because it is so damn slow. I am not able to use Camino, because it doesn't play correclty with the UCLA proxy server, which by the way I will be losing soon as Xochitl is officially graduating from UCLA soon. Then I will be stuck with the vastly inferior, hardly worth having UMB version. Boy, talk about a shitty library. Well, I wouldn't mind living in the building, it is very nice, but they can't afford to fill the library with any current journals relevant to my research. Even Hopkins sucks compared to UCLA. The UMB library insists that their proxy only works with Netscape on the Mac. I'll have to look into that as soon as the UCLA proxy expires. I seriously doubt their claim. Who uses Netscape on the Mac anymore??