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Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone

sciencemag.org

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Re: Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone

#251

Post by maaku »

nailer wrote: post #144
dalke wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Journals are used as a proxy for quality. A publication in "Science" or "Nature" is generally regarded as being better than a publication in, say, the "Proceedings of the National Academy of Science". Bibliographic metrics, like the number of publications and where they are published, are use as a proxy for the quality of someone's research. It can affect grant funding and career advancement. Researchers can publish…

> A publication in "Science" or "Nature" What excludes the academic from also publishing elsewhere?

The contract you sign with the owners of Science and Nature preclude publishing elsewhere.

Re: Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone

#252

Post by jbmorgado »

chris_wot wrote: post #71
Jerry2 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine wasting some researcher's valuable time on tracking papers for you! The gall of these publishing companies never ceases to amaze.

Not very helpful for Wikipedia researchers. Or people who are outside the walled garden of academia!

"walled garden of academia"

The walled garden of academia is not so fruitful as outsiders are led to think it is.

We struggle year after year to pay salaries and still have money to buy the equipment and material we need for the projects, we don't have that much left to spend on buying access articles that we and our peers wrote and that we and our peers reviewed, all for free while some publisher makes millions on it.

Re: Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone

#253

Post by School-Cotton »

maaku wrote: post #247
3pt14159 wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you live in a city with a University, like Toronto, check out getting a library card to their library system. It costs me $300 / year and it's unlimited research papers. The only downside is that it is retrievable in person only, so you kinda need to be either close to the University or keep a list of papers you need before you make the trek out.

You are paying $300/year for access to information that was given to the world freely, and sacrificing your time and effort to get it? Do you see the problem here?

He didn't claim there wasn't a problem, just gave practical advice for making the most of the unfair situation

Re: Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone

#254

Post by Chinjut »

notahacker wrote: post #171
Fuxy wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haven't we solved the quality issue in other situations by giving users the ability to rate a scientific paper. What's wrong with giving other researchers the ability to rate and comment on a paper. It's a not a perfect filter but I would argue it works just as well a this journal reputation system and it prevents issues like people having to publish with them to get recognized not to mention it encourages discussion…

A rating system would generally become an indicator of other academics' level of agreement with a paper, rather than an indication that it passed a quality and significance threshold. Citation ranking schemes already exist, but the citation counts are heavily influenced by academics being unable to NOT mention a dissenting view because it was recently published in a prominent journal. And I'm not sure examples like A…

Does pre-publication "peer review" not already function to some extent similarly as an indicator of level of agreement rather than a disinterested, objective quality and significance threshold? Everything I know of human processes suggests that it would.

Re: Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone

#255

Post by alanwatts »

bcook wrote: post #226
alanwatts wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea of "Right vs Wrong" or "Good vs Evil", is a debate mostly based on emotions rather than logic.

My post was not comparing good or evil. I was saying that simply because you feel something does not make it so. 1 + 1 = 2, regardless of how I feel about the numbers or operators.

Ah, my mistake. What would your logical explanation be for this then?

Re: Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone

#256

Post by hanklazard »

tomkinstinch wrote: post #250
hanklazard wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. I wonder why nothing of that sort exists for the biomedical sciences? Maybe it's been tried but these publishers won't allow it?

The biomedical sciences have bioRxiv: http://biorxiv.org/ It is not used as broadly as arxiv.org, but that may be starting to change.

Nice to know, thanks!

Re: Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone

#257

Post by Natanael_L »

petra wrote: post #243
alco wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have there been attempts at dispersing the whole collection of papers through torrents or IPFS? The goal here is not to have a central location with a pretty web page but to make the content freely accessibly everywhere by anyone. Distributing it over thousands of nodes would achieve that goal.

Torrents are pretty bad at the archiving problem , i.e. maintaining copies of things with no readership over a long time. Not a great fit for this stuff.

Yes and no. You need servers that guarantee availability (but they could hide themselves pretty well if necessary). Then the torrents provide accessibility.

Re: Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone

#258

Post by dikaiosune »

dalke wrote: post #172
Fuxy wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haven't we solved the quality issue in other situations by giving users the ability to rate a scientific paper. What's wrong with giving other researchers the ability to rate and comment on a paper. It's a not a perfect filter but I would argue it works just as well a this journal reputation system and it prevents issues like people having to publish with them to get recognized not to mention it encourages discussion…

"by giving users the ability to rate a scientific paper." LOL! No. Ratings are nearly useless. By which I mean I don't know how I would incorporate ratings into my own research. How do you keep a ratings system from being a proxy for popularity, rather than a measure of novelty or utility? How do you keep it from being easily gamed? Does a "5.2" for a 1995 paper have the same meaning as a "5.2" for a 2010 paper? "You…

> How do you keep a ratings system from being a proxy for popularity, rather than a measure of novelty or utility? How do you keep it from being easily gamed?

To respond to this particular point, I'm not familiar with any characteristics of the academic journal system which prevent these problems either. Name recognition is often key to getting into competitive journals, which is just another way of calling it an easily gamed popularity contest.

Re: Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone

#259

Post by joelthelion »

taneq wrote: post #4

> “I’m all for universal access, but not theft!” tweeted Elsevier’s director of universal access, Alicia Wise You want everybody to have access, but you don't want them to get it for free. Wow, so you want the entire world to all pay for the material you were given for free. Hmmmm.

Actually people often pay for the privilege of giving them the material.

Re: Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone

#260

Post by aab0 »

School-Cotton wrote: post #253
maaku wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are paying $300/year for access to information that was given to the world freely, and sacrificing your time and effort to get it? Do you see the problem here?

He didn't claim there wasn't a problem, just gave practical advice for making the most of the unfair situation

Even more practical advice: 'use Libgen'.
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