41–50 of 50 posts
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"so called "peer review", to be honest, is a broken system... " To misquote Churchill: Peer review is the worst system for scientific publishing... except for all the others.
It's not misquote, it's paraphrase.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Peer review happens the following way: editor gets manuscript, if it passes first cut (it's not obviously crazy) sends to three elder scholars in the (hopefully) appropriate subfield, they send it back after about 3 months with snarky comments based on cutting edge work their advisors did done 10-20 years previous, rinse repeat In the social sciences, it takes about 2 years from submission to paper publication. In th…
There's some truth to what you say, but I think it's a little over-cynical. I know the biology/chemistry world so that's all I can speak on. In bio/chem the peer review system has flaws, but it's largely effective, IMHO. I've never seen a paper take longer than 6 months from submission to publication (I've published 22 papers) and the majority take ~3 months. There are bad reviewers out there that are unscrupulous, l…
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Also if somebody isn't aware, Google Scholar finds all sources of articles and there's usually a PDF available somewhere.
Mm... I'm not sure about that. Google Scholar is a good resource, that's true. But there are hundreds of papers I've looked for that are simply not accessible without proper access. That said, I don't support this site.
This is plain-old piracy and I'm a little surprised to see it getting up-voted on HN. There are plenty of open-access journals, but most scientists choose to publish in closed journals instead for a variety of reasons. I think the results of research funded by taxpayers should be free and, indeed, that is now required by the NIH and there's a huge resource available here: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/ However some…
That isn't clear - the relationship between a journal and an author is generally that the author retains copyright ownership (i.e. there is no assignment), but grants a copyright license to the journal, and in the case of non-open access journals, the license is generally largely exclusive.
Linking to a PDF put up by the author (i.e. the copyright holder) is not copyright infringement, because the copyright owner has clearly authorised it. However, the author may, in some cases, be breaching their contract with the journal, and if the site operators deliberately incite people to breach contracts, it could be tortious interference. However, in many cases, even where the journal has an exclusive license, the terms often allow for preprints to be distributed, sometimes immediately, and sometimes after a specific amount of time.
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You have obviously never been to Harvard, where in fact you do. (You can also work at Harvard and get a library card as a perk. I often contemplate this fact.) The good news is that MIT has a much more awesome library and you can, in fact, turn up in person at MIT as a civilian and read copies of Nature . Of course, you have to make the time to do that. The parking is tricky, so you'd best ride the train. Even in the…
ok this is what you do: you go to the library only once, get a membership card and a username/password for electronic use. and use that username/password to access electronic resources of that library from anywhere. i hope this helps. edit:grammar.
I wanted to start a 'scienceleaks' site that was actually a site that facilitated the whistleblowing on scientific fraud. A small raffle for a cash prize can be a huge incentive for underpaid grad students.
Most of the university students have to almost all scientific documents thanks to the library subscriptions of their universities. It will be really easy to fill the website with thousands of papers but is it worth it? is it right to do so? If you are doing academic work you can easily apply for membership to any of those libraries and get access to any paper you need without violating copyright.
If you are doing academic work you can easily apply for membership to any of those libraries Warning: Pet peeve alert . Scientists routinely complain that the public unfairly brands them as isolated ivory-tower eggheads whose work is too insular and rarefied to have any relevance to the real world. They also complain that the general public has a poor idea of how science actually works: People often view it as some k…
With grant money being tight, and university administration pushing for meaningless metrics such as "number of papers published" to rank professors, publishing in open access journals can add up. Furthermore, many areas of study do not yet have good open access options.
Putting up content on a public website may sound great, but is not an option. Despite the problems with peer review, it remains the best and only way to both vet published work as well as uphold some level of quality.
The public does not help with the financial aspects either. While the public feels that managers in successful companies fully deserve outrageously high salaries, and that those companies themselves deserve incredible profit margins, the same sentiments do not apply to academic research.
It seems that public sentiment is that academics deserve to live in squalor while working for free. Graduate students, who do the bulk of the grunt work of science, already get paid barely above the poverty line. Of course, to the public, these are lazy students with too much free time. In short, the public always wants more from science while paying less. You may argue that it is this way because people don't have a choice in the matter, they must pay taxes. Fair enough, but if science was funded by industry, instead of journals with pay walls, the public would have absolutely no access to research for any amount of money. I, for one, feel that is a much worse outcome.
The new Misguided Morality: Theft = Liberation.
Piracy of this sort, if it could be kept to those that would not otherwise purchase this article at any profitable price point for the journal, could actually be economically/education-optimal, perhaps?
Also, the last time I checked, copyright had exceptions for academic use. Although I think these are usually limited to copying/reproduction, not the right of publication/distribution, I find these to be distinctions that just aren't warranted in the digital era.
Most of the university students have to almost all scientific documents thanks to the library subscriptions of their universities. It will be really easy to fill the website with thousands of papers but is it worth it? is it right to do so? If you are doing academic work you can easily apply for membership to any of those libraries and get access to any paper you need without violating copyright.
A data point: I have actually tried this. As a student at No Name State, I often found myself travelling to nearby Prestigious Research University for books and journals which weren't in circulation at NNS. PRU only had reciprocity agreements with other PRUs, so I couldn't ILL materials or check them out in person with my NNS card. Indeed, without a PRU ID I couldn't even enter the library except at certain designate…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You have obviously never been to Harvard, where in fact you do. (You can also work at Harvard and get a library card as a perk. I often contemplate this fact.) The good news is that MIT has a much more awesome library and you can, in fact, turn up in person at MIT as a civilian and read copies of Nature . Of course, you have to make the time to do that. The parking is tricky, so you'd best ride the train. Even in the…
ok this is what you do: you go to the library only once, get a membership card and a username/password for electronic use. and use that username/password to access electronic resources of that library from anywhere. i hope this helps. edit:grammar.