71–80 of 212 posts
I'm glad they've found a workaround but that being said, opening a PDF attachment coming from god knows where isn't the best idea. I hope they're being careful.
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> There's a cheaper solution for foundational papers. Go to your library and use interlibrary loan. Not sure that's really an option when not in the US.
I think people in the US don't realize how much better the US library system is than most of the rest of the world. Even the developed world!
#icanhazdf, Sci-Hub, libgen, etc. are all symptoms of the disease. Science is in something like turmoil as it adjusts to the internet. Of course, the rest of the world has already adjusted to the internet - science hasn't because publishers have used their monopoly over our scientific knowledgebase to systematically prevent progress. Some food for thought: science is mostly funded by public money. A small portion of…
I would think academia is in turmoil as it (mal)adjusts to the internet, rather than science. Polymath project[0], and other initiatives are only possible because of the internet.
Publishers act like gatekeepers of knowledge just like academia does with its credentialing/signaling, and they are both complicit in that relationship, which is increasingly moving towards obsolescence in a world where people talk freely of such subjects online and can become informed and knowledgeable on such subjects. One of the postdocs in my lab didn't even know sci-hub even existed, until I, a degreeless researcher showed him. He was utterly reliant upon his institutions and non scalable means of directly contacting researchers before that point. I'd be fooling myself to think he's the only one in his position who didn't know.
People are already finding incentives/ways to pursue knowledge, just like people found other ways to pursue science when the church no longer became the place to in the past. People are just routing around their present institutions.
This is what makes the situation profoundly more complex compared to other application of copyright, say in the software industry, where clearly switching to an open source model doesn't change the incentives i.e. who assesses the quality of software.
The long term effects on academia of switching to a model where the taxpayer gives money to scientists to pay for open access submssion of their research are hard to evaluate, and do no get enough though (imho).
That clearly doesn't mean that there aren't bad journals that are not OA, nor that for the benefit of the public some sort of arrangement shouldn't be found for older research: I'm a big believer in "faster decaying" copyright in general, and mandating that all publications describing research that is publicly funded become OA after, say, 30 years, would help significantly.
Apologies in advance, but when I saw this link, I expected to find an article with a non-nondescript phrase ("Blue Iguana" or some such) that would tip people off to meet in an unlisted IRC room or some such. I realize not everyone is on top of internet culture and slang, but reading "#icanhazpdf" is a "secret codeword" makes me wonder if the whole piece is tongue-in-cheek ("I am shocked, absolutely shocked to find g…
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Mmm. As a poor person growing up in Britain I hold the same viewpoint. The whole argument around piracy and copyright seems to revolve around this idea of being 'too cheap' or 'not wanting to support'. When 10GBP for some music or 100+GBP for some software package (Office, for example) is 50% or more of your monthly pay, or you have no income at all, none of those factors come in to the decision. It's the only realis…
Hopefully we will have an open-source car you can download and print soon!
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Visual Studio 2015 Professional is available in the meantime for free (as beer) under the name "Visual Studio Community 2015" for private developers and small companies: > https://www.visualstudio.com/products/visual-studio-communit...
They did the great move some years ago by first releasing the compiler part (MS VC++ 2000-something Toolkit) and then later the entire IDE. Having just the compiler part was enough to hook it up to Code::Blocks and ditch the pirated VC++ 6.0 I used before. Another great move was that the released free compiler part allowed for commercial use; some of my friends from amateur gamedev community used that to sell their p…
> The original tweet is deleted, so there's no public record of the paper changing hands. Why is it assumed that there is no public record of the paper changing hands? They tweet the request publicly, so it stands to reason that someone is paying attention and archiving. I suppose the key word here is "public", but I'm not sure why that matters if the goal is covering up illegal activity.
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They did the great move some years ago by first releasing the compiler part (MS VC++ 2000-something Toolkit) and then later the entire IDE. Having just the compiler part was enough to hook it up to Code::Blocks and ditch the pirated VC++ 6.0 I used before. Another great move was that the released free compiler part allowed for commercial use; some of my friends from amateur gamedev community used that to sell their p…
Wasn't the C++ compiler already released as part of the Windows SDK or was that (including the C++ compiler in the Windows SDK) a step that Microsoft didn't take until later on?
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> I also don't like it but the paper needs be printed and reviewed. This is not free. I have peer reviewed various academic papers for Elsevier without receiving any monetary compensation. Moreover, quite small amount of academic papers is read in a printed form, at least among my colleagues. Where the money goes to?
You think the paper is free? You think the editors, typesetters etc are free? I'm not saying it should be as expensive as it is, I'm saying if you want to distribute for free, the publishing party (the research group) will have to pay more or the journal will have to take less profits.
Nobody needs to pay more, but the publishers should certainly be making less profit. What really needs to happen is the publishers need to be replaced by more efficient ones. See for example Scholastica, who provide the entire journal infrastructure for $10/article. Or the PeerJ, charge just $99/year to publish with them.