Friday, August 09, 2013

Good-bye to printed issues?

A comment to my answer to the ongoing survey of the British Lichen Society (sorry for the sloppy structure and editing of the text - it's rather spontaneous):

"I have been a member of BLS for many years, and from the membership always appreciated most the printed issues of the journal The Lichenologist. I'm still employed by a university that has an electronic subscription to the Lichenologist, hence I might in fact even consider stop being a member of the BLS! Particularly since I have recently stepped down from being a full-time professional lichenologist... HOWEVER, since I have started to feel that nowadays perhaps not the Lichenologist, but the BLS Bulletin is the most important thing that I get from my membership, I might stay as a member...

Another point, in an electronic-only Lichenologist I would almost never find anything interesting that I wasn't very actively looking for! The biggest issue about electronic-only publications, in my opinion, is that you don't leaf them through. In the long-term, I fear that the science of lichenology will be suffering, as all Natural Sciences will. But then again, perhaps that's where science (and humanity?) is heading; towards many isolated islands of knowledge, which are not curiosity-driven or benefitting from chance!?"

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