Jane's Defense

[LoBlo]

Anyone here ever have access to Jane's Defense Weekly website? Is it worth the subscription cost? What's in there that's not in other free defense websites?

http://www.janes.com/

[Katja]

Whether or not it will be worth the subscription cost is based on your need for the service. If you are interetsed in Defense Weekly ( http://jdw.janes.com ) to be an informed reader, no way is it worth it. If you are looking for techincal drawings, diagrams, pictures...blah blah... for your naval research facility, yes it is. I have had access to Jane's Online and played with it - it is very intersting to say the least. For the average person however, it is not necessary to have. I did not specifically browse Defense Weekly so I can not offer up the difference between the digital format compared to the print PDF articles I access through an electronic database.

To obtain titles and abstracts of the articles in Defense Weekly you can register online for free. After you obtain a list of the articles you want, you can access those articles in 3 ways:

1) Find a library which subscribes to Jane's directly or offers Jane's through a 3rd party vendor. If you are in an academic environment, check to see if your library has EBSCO "military and governemnt collection" - this databse offers 4 different Jane's products - Defense Weekly, International Defense Review, Intelligence Review and Navy International.
Few academic libraries offer their databases to the public since cost is largely based on usage rather than content. Can you imagine payng $55,000 a year for Jane's Online so less than 1,000 employees can have access to the materials - insane.

2) Request articles through inter library loan (ILL) service. As a survival mechanism, most libraries have set up consortium through their regions consisting of academic, public, goverment, special (medical, technology, military, etc) libraries and information centers to reduce the cost of materials. For free or a fee, most libraries can get photocopied, or digital copies of articles from reciprocating branches. As long as the materials you are requesting is
public (non-classified) you may be able to get it from the local military library.

3) Order specific articles directly from Jane's or a third party vendor such as NARAC. Even if each article costs $20, you would save a lot of money. That is unless you decide to read each and every article available in the Defense Weekly subscription - which you may if you decide to pay $1,000 for the subscription.

I do not think it is necessary for a single person to pay anywhere from $700 to $1,600 a year to be informed. I would try other avenues first, even the print magazine would be more cost effective. At the rate of $1,000, you would be better off signing up for a college class to get access to EBSCO and still save about $200. The only advantage to the electronic version is that an archive is available but Jane's does not specify online how far back it goes. The EBSCO I currently use only has archival access to Defense Weekly back to 2003.

Hope that helps