Another open site closes

Steve Simon

2005-05-23

[StATS]: Another open site closes (May 23, 2005)

I often link to interesting resources on the web, and it is always distressing to find that content which had been available freely is now available only through subscription or through membership in a professional society. This breaks all the links I have on my web pages and there is no way to fix these links. When you are providing educational examples to a broad audience, you cannot assume that most of your readers belong to a particular scientific or medical society or that they subscribe to a particular journal or magazine.

The economics of providing free content on the web are difficult, of course, and I can’t fault someone for trying to earn a dollar for their hard work. I just wish there was a way to help out people like me who have relied on these sources and suddenly have to come up with replacements for all these links. Perhaps these sites could keep existing content free, but offer any future content only to paying customers.

American Medical News (amednews.com). which is published by the American Medical Association, is the latest group to take free content off of the web and offer it only to paying customers. Here are six articles from American Medical News that I had cited (or planned to cite) on various parts of these web pages. You and I will have to learn to live without these excellent resources:

Take a look at these links now, because they will disappear sometime in June.

I am trying my best to only use sources that are freely available, and sources that I expect to remain freely available in the foreseeable future.

You can find an earlier version of this page on my website.