Ars Technica's John Timmer writes about the decline of print science journals, as the American Chemical Society abandons the format. Some reminiscences:
It's tempting to ascribe some of the journals' decline to laziness—researchers being unwilling to make the effort to walk a few hundred meters (or, possibly, even a few floors) to visit the library. If anything, however, the converse is actually true. For those of you too young to remember, a trip to the library would often involve several hours of wandering among shelves that did not lend themselves to a linear, alphabetic organization of content; older and less popular journals often turned out to be stored off site. Spending a day in the library largely meant that other work was set aside for the day.
