On-line Access to Scientific Journals

One of our students (Sabina) recently posted this comment to our university newsgroups [BIOME].

However, we are VERY fortunate at [the University of Toronto] because we can download any full PDF of an article from almost all possible journals imaginable for free with just our UTorID from the Gerstein off-site access which leads into PubMed, so, we don’t even need a subscription to anything (unless you really enjoy having all those shiny pages at your disposal). So we don’t need to worry about costs for an individual article, most people that need them are associated with an institution that will already have a subscription.

This reminded me how lucky we are to enjoy such open access. Our library currently subscribes to 31,000 journals that allow faculty and students to download articles/abstracts as PDF files. What this means for teachers is that we can assign an article from the scientific literature knowing that every student can print it out at home or on one of the university computers in the "information commons." They can even print it out on a color printer—an important consideration in my field where many of the journal images are in color.


How much does this service cost the university? I asked our librarians for an estimate and they told me it costs several million dollars (<$2,000,000) per year.

Just how lucky are we? I know that some of my friends at other universities don't have access to the same journals we get. I presume that everyone can get articles from Nature and Science but what about the Journal of Biological Chemistry (JBC) or the Journal of Molecular Evolution?