Remember, your library card expires when you graduate

A recent interview with Bora Zivkovic has an important reminder for every student. (Zivkovic is the author of A Blog Around the Clock, a science blog, and Online Community Manager for the open access journal PLoS ONE.)

The reminder is: Your library card expires when you graduate.

Back in grad school I was a fanatical downloader and reader of scientific papers. I read papers old and new in my field, in several related fields, and in some unrelated but interesting fields. I read, carefully, several papers per day. Then, a few months after I left grad school and started science blogging, my password expired for the school library and suddenly I realized what I never thought of before — papers are actually NOT free and available for everyone to read. And I needed my daily dose of papers, both for blogging and for my, at the time, illusion of writing a Dissertation. I had to resort to begging friends for PDFs.

If you think that everyone should have access to the scientific literature, even if they’re not students, then you should support open access. Because one day, you won’t be a student either…