If a researcher does not have an individual or institutional subscription to a journal, she can easily pay as much as $35 to access a single article. But such pay walls for scientific articles may soon be a thing of the past for users of the University of Utah’s J. Willard Marriot Library. The library, together with Nature Publishing Group (NPG) and the tech startup Labtiva, recently initiated a pilot program that allows readers to access individual articles from NPG journals, even if the Marriot Library doesn’t subscribe to the journal in question. Rather than the user paying out-of-pocket, the university foots the bill—for a reduced rate. University librarians hope the new program will help expand user access to research articles while helping keep subscription costs down.
“Historically, libraries buy access at the journal title level,” said Rick Anderson, interim dean of the Marriott Library. “But there’s a fundamental problem—you ...
