So Long Paper Journals

Derek Lowe says his goodbyes to hard copies of journals. A recent Nature news story reported that the American Chemical Society would be moving its publications to be online only. Susan King, the senior vice-president of the ACS's publishing division, wrote a letter to the society's associate editors saying that the change was due to an "accelerated decline in demand for print subscriptions and the diminishing financial return from the print format." Lowe writes that he's been expecting this shift, though he adds that browsing RSS feeds isn't the same as leafing through a bound journal. "So in a way, I'll miss the bound versions. But then I think of those boxes in my basement, and I realize that there's really no other way," he writes.