Community Embraces New Word Game at Mid-Year Play Day This past Sunday, families at Takoma Park’s Seventh Annual Mid-Year Play Day had the opportunity to experience OtherWordly for the first time. Our educational language game drew curious children and parents to our table throughout the afternoon. Words in Space Several children gathered around our iPads […]
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Science journal subscriptions can cost libraries several thousand dollars a year, yet most institutions members only make use of a few articles from each of these journals. The huge subscription expenses limit how many journals each school or company can carry. Even single article pricing can be staggering, at $30-50 each. Sinisa Hrvatin, a doctoral candidate at Harvard, and his roommate Robert McGrath believe they have a better way.
Their new system, ReadCube Access, has an iTunes sales approach: a library can rent an article for less than $6 or can buy the same article for $11 (or less, depending on the source). Hrvatin and McGrath hope that ReadCube Access can not only lower expenses for universities, but also allow more journals to reach students around the country.
Other features allow for importing PDFs, finding new papers via Google Scholar or PubMed, downloads via institutions’ paywalled logins, recommendations, annotations, and citations.
They sold their idea to industry giant Nature Publishing Group and to the University of Utah’s library system. (See their blog post.)