161–170 of 212 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What did Urban VII do?
Prosecuted Galileo, resulting in him spending the rest of his life under house arrest?
But the anwser to your question, "How many decades of astronomical progress did we lose to Urban VII?", given the sources referenced upthread is: apparently zero. Neither Urban VIII nor the rest of papacy seem to have held back Kepler or Newton.
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Again Open (access) and Free (publication) are largely orthogonal. For instance PLOS journals are Open Access but not Free Publication, the publication fees funding edition and review.
Well I guess I don't see free and open as being opposing to each other. Now there is the option of being Free as in Beer but I really believe with the Internet we can have free and open. IF someone takes grant money from the government the research should be both free from fees and not behind a paid wall.
Orthogonal means independent, not opposing. You can have free and open, you can have free and closed, you can have non-free and open and you can have non-free and closed.
> IF someone takes grant money from the government the research should be both free from fees and not behind a paid wall.
Be as it may, even with mostly volunteers running a peer-reviewed journal has costs, so unless governments start journal grants of sorts...
The internet has brought a new method of information dissemination, a free method. not only are for-profit scientific journals outdated relics by now, but they're clearly aware of that fact and grasping for straws to stay relevant.
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Based on your clarification, it appears that your comments are opinion based on a couple of brief personal experiences. From your original comment I assumed you were making a broader and more definite statement. Thank you for correcting my assumption. Regarding the English library system, as JupiterMoon pointed out, the British library provides interlibrary loan services, which is the topic at hand. In fact, I've use…
Interlibrary loan services are wonderful. They were a lifesaver when I lived in a small town of 40,000 people 400 km away from the nearest "city" (of 120,000 people). But they are not a substitute for being able to browse the stacks; it's like the difference between using a web browser and a command-line anonymous FTP client.
If I am wrong about my interpretation, let me point out that the US system isn't especially better than other developed countries in this respect.
For example, the local college library to where I went to high school in Miami requires a fee to enter the library. http://library.miami.edu/policies/non-um-patron-access/ . (As a student in an advanced class, we got a special pass to allow us to do research in the library.) A member of the public can only visit the Stanford university library for free for 7 days of the year (http://library.stanford.edu/using/access-and-privileges/visi... ).
You mention open stacks, and I fully appreciate the joy of being able to browse. However, your enthusiasm about any US experience must be tempered. Many US academic libraries have off-campus shelving (eg, https://bioethics.georgetown.edu/using-the-library/request-b... and http://www.library.yale.edu/Administration/junk.Shelving/Wor... ). Quoting from the last of those two URLs:
> Many universities, including Harvard, have successfully adopted off-campus shelving as a way to meet both their shelving and preservation needs.* Such shelving costs a tenth of what on-campus shelving costs, and it provides nearly ideal conditions for the long-term preservation of library materials. The principal disadvantage of off-campus shelving is that readers cannot browse the material at these facilities.
Perhaps it's more like using gopher than a web brower. ;)
Information wants to be free.
"On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable.
The right information in the right place just changes your life.
On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting
it out is getting lower and lower all the time.
So you have these two fighting against each other."
I've never published a paper, and can't understand why we need actors like Elsevier and other paywalls for scientific research publication. What motivates scientists to use a publisher's services? Can't these be replicated by setting up a government publication house?
A government publication house would overly centralize things, and would organize research by geography and politics rather than subject matter. Science is a worldwide endeavor, and ought to be insulated from political influence as much as we are able to do so.
And we certainly don't need any more juicy nexus points, dripping with extractable rents, throbbing and pulsating for the benefit of the leeches.
One academic publications office per university or independent lab would certainly cost a bit more in overhead, but nowhere near as much as what is currently lost to the publisher conglomerates for both publication and access.
The aggregation function of the journals could be fulfilled by a nomination and community moderation process among the researchers and students of any particular discipline.
Publishing via university web site would also allow linking to related files, such as the raw data, conference video, audio, or transcripts, executable simulator or demonstration programs, and related research, all with permanent, canonical URLs.
While I am not an academic, I notice that many of the journal-curated publications (that I can read for free) have only static diagrams, whereas if you go to the researcher's web site, you can see animated illustrations, executable programs, and lecture slide decks or videos. When the mission of science is to not only advance the frontiers of human knowledge, but also explain what you did and to disseminate the new knowledge to others, a plain old PDF locked up behind a paywall might not be the best way to do that.
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Why is it parasitic again? These journals are providing a service. You may not agree with the cost of that service and are free (both authors and reader) to get that service somewhere else.
> These journals are providing a service. The journals provide a service, but Elsevier is a rent-seeking entity, it buys up/takes over publications and hikes up prices. http://imechanica.org/node/1531#comment-3251 estimates that the International Journal of Solids and Structures cost about $0.5m/year to run and had revenues of about $3.5m, or a net profit of $3m going to Elsevier for owning the journal and little els…
High prestige journals offer value to both authors and readers. Apparently both authors and readers feel it's worth the money.
And again, there is nothing stopping anyone else from starting their own journal. If they fail, then authors and readers must find some value in the current situation.
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Printing is a separate concern to modern publishing - if people want to read paper versions of academic work, they can foot the bill. Academic editors often work free for scientific publishers, and very few journals employ copy editors (though some do). Typesetting for the internet can be automated. Nobody needs to pay more, but the publishers should certainly be making less profit. What really needs to happen is the…
Agree, but the publishers will only take those reduced profits if they feel threatened. So start with motivating scientists to choose open access journals if you want to do it the legal way. I don't understand why scientists first pick a journal that takes their rights to their paper away and then offer it for free via "secret codes". Seems to me they are supporting the current, closed system.
The reason is that a scientist not doing this would (rightly or wrongly) have fewer publications in the 'best' journals as considered by the rest of their field and by impact and citation measurements, would therefore be less well known and well cited, and would struggle more to succeed. This is wrong and bad and so on, but it's probably widely true.
I've never published a paper, and can't understand why we need actors like Elsevier and other paywalls for scientific research publication. What motivates scientists to use a publisher's services? Can't these be replicated by setting up a government publication house?
To be concise, your qualifications for a university may depend on what journals you publish your articles in, and how "prestigious" they are.