When the scientific news we cover is based on a publication, we do our best to provide readers with a link to the article itself at the bottom of the report. However, what we can’t do is guarantee that you can do everything with that link. In most cases, journals charge for access to the full article, which usually means that if you’re not in a library or on a campus, you probably won’t be able to view the details of the research involved.
Open access journals such as PeerJ And PLoS are not affected by this problem, but they publish a small fraction of the total number of newspapers in existence. As a result, the phrase “I don’t have access to the newspaper …” is quite common in our commentary discussions.
Late last year, Nature Publishing Group announced that it would offer limited access (no save, no print) to its journals, including Nature itself and more specialized magazines such as nature physics And Natural Geosciences. Any link to an article in one of the few news outlets would take the reader to the full text of the article.
At the time, Ars Technica was not one of the recorded newscasts, but that has now changed. Readers are now directed to the full text of the article via all links on our site. We would like to thank Nature Publishing for arranging this feature. And while this still leaves many publications behind paywalls, hopefully we will see a little less “I can’t access the paper…”.