The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) on Friday told staff members it has canceled subscriptions carried by its National Agricultural Library as part of a drive by President Donald Trump’s administration to cut federal spending. The move appears to drop nearly 400 of the library’s roughly 2000 journals, including many prominent in various agricultural subfields – but curiously none from the world’s three largest scientific publishers, all of which are for-profit. USDA staff members depicted the move as hasty, indiscriminate slashing.

The library provides full texts of paywalled journal articles to USDA’s staff scientists – at the start of the year, ARS alone employed about 2000 scientists and postdoctoral researchers – and loans papers to scientists across the country whose host institutions lack a subscription to a particular journal. The agricultural library is one of five U.S. national libraries. 

Most of the affected publishers are university or nonprofit scientific society presses, including Cambridge University Press; Oxford University Press; the American Phytopathological Society; the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, which publishes the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences; and AAAS, which publishes Science. Several of the journals whose subscriptions were canceled rank in the top quartile for impact factor in their subfield.

 
Source https://www.science.org/content/article/doge-order-leads-journal-cancellations-u-s-agricultural-library

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