171–180 of 230 posts
Journals could still exist to peer review and aggregate links, so you’d have the prestige of being in the journal, but there’s no reason to restrict access.
Why aren’t all scholarly papers just published as HTML on the author’s website? This is literally what the web was made for. Journals could still exist to peer review and aggregate links, so you’d have the prestige of being in the journal, but there’s no reason to restrict access.
System is broken, do not get me wrong. But just a homepage is not the solution
Why aren’t all scholarly papers just published as HTML on the author’s website? This is literally what the web was made for. Journals could still exist to peer review and aggregate links, so you’d have the prestige of being in the journal, but there’s no reason to restrict access.
Some random bits of context. This conflict goes back a long time. In the early 1990's, with online journals just getting started, MIT was able to insist on principles like "anyone physically in the library has full access, even if they are not otherwise affiliated with MIT". A couple of years later, power shifted, and Elsevier could "our terms, take it or leave it". Then three decades, a human generation, of Elsevier…
> we're today using X Windows instead of CMU's Andrew And in that world, TypeScript would have to find another name! Now, good luck googling Andrew Typescript :) Edit: Found it... https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~AUIS/ljdocs/mkmost/fig4.gif
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~AUIS/ljdocs/mkmost/welcome.html
Quote:
typescript (see Figure 4 (Sample Typescript Window)) provides an alternative to xterm. You enter commands to your shell in the input window and the results are shown in the same window where they can be scrolled, searched or saved. Typescript does not support curses like xterm does, so you cannot run vi or bash in a typescript, for example. However, you can use the tcsh or pdksh (ksh) shells.
Typescript has several other features that I find very useful. The README for the word processing package describes how you can cause the current working directory to be kept in the title of the typescript window. Typescript is "smart" about these paths, too. Notice in Figure 4. that the path shown in the title of the window is "~", my home directory, and not a fully qualified path.
Typescript supports use of several PC keys to make it easier to enter commands. The Cursor-Left and Cursor-Right keys can be used to edit the command I am entering (regardless if my shell supports this). The Home and End keys will move the cursor to the beginning or end of the line (or selected area). The cursor keys are also mapped to allow me to move up and down the the command history. Cursor-Up gets the previous command entered, Cursor-Down the one after.
In my opinion an even more useful feature is command completion. If I type "ls" and then press Cursor-Up, I get the previous command that began with "ls". File completion is supported with the tab key. If I enter "ls src/tp" and then press the tab key, typescript will complete the path "src/tp" to "src/tpg-config" (in my case). It makes entering paths to files ten times easier. I love it!
If I enter a command like "ls /etc", the window will likely fill and scroll automatically. If I want to see the beginning of the scrolled data, I must use the mouse (or Page-Up/Down keys) to scroll. However, if I enter "ls /etc control-J" (where I enter the command with a control-J keystroke, rather than the normal Enter), the command is executed, but the output is pushed to the top of the current window so I do not need to scroll.
Typescript also allows me to create my own menus in the file ~/.shmenu. In Figure 4, you can see I have a menu card Internet on the menubar. This is from my own .shmenu file which looks like this:Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it's because not a lot of professions access these research journals for their day to day outside of medicine, engineering, and academia. It's just not an issue for most people's everyday. So it's just not an issue.
> It's just not an issue for most people's everyday. Sure, but if you look at any of the fairly ridiculous and designed-to-be-divisive issues that pretty much decide every bit of our political conversation.. anything can be an issue. Making the military more diverse is a good example, because while it's absolutely important, it also affects less than 1% of people directly, and less than 3% indirectly. I'd hazard a gu…
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> "our terms, take it or leave it". So many monopolies do this and they should all be disrupted. This is our world, and anyone telling us they get to gatekeep information exchange is not an ally. Google with Chrome, Apple with iPhone. > Societal change can be so very slow, nonmonotonic, and profoundly discouraging. And yet here we are, making progress. Encouraging, but we lost Aaron.
> This is our world, and anyone telling us they get to gatekeep information exchange is not an ally Sorry, but this is a worldview that universally leads to nastiness. It's everyone's world, and just as I don't have the right to sleep in your bed (even though it's "our" world and who are you to stop "us"?) we have to have a non-low resolution and non-tribal view of situations. There is a way to think about this that…
I wonder how far California could go on its own in destroying the journal cartels. They really are a parasitic racket, and I don't think the average voter understand how bad it really is. I feel like one basic ballot measure to the effect of "All state funded research shall be released to the public domain, and all prior contract terms to the contrary are hereby void" might be enough to knock over the first domino, h…
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> "All state funded research shall be released to the public domain, and all prior contract terms to the contrary are hereby void" That's already a requirement for a huge amount of research.
Yes but you still need the journal's stamp of approval for your CV - in my past life having the paper on biorxiv did not count towards anything. The number of papers per year in the top 20% of journals in the field was one of two metrics they assessed my career progression by (along with grant money). As long as universities and funders require similar journal-based KPIs we will not make any progress.
Break the an oligopoly by making them irrelevant. Academia cannot continue to feed these monsters with free resources and then also try to contain them.
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> "...all prior contract terms to the contrary are hereby void" I don't think this second part you suggest is something the state can just unilaterally do if there's an existing valid contract and the other party doesn't agree. You could mandate that no contracts may be renewed and all contracts should be terminated as soon as the terms permit.
> I don't think this second part you suggest is something the state can just unilaterally do If the state does not enforce a contract through the courts, what is it really worth?
It specifically prohibits states from voiding contracts and ensures they must be enforced
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Editing, typesetting and curating are expensive. Yes, authors can do this and they contribute quite a bit, but it's not enough to support the high quality documents produced by Elsevier. Yes, tex-savvy authors can do a pretty good job but it's just not the same. That's one reason authors choose to pay the page charges. Curating is also surprisingly important. Sure, you can often get some author to send you a free PDF…
In my experience, the average Elsevier paper has worse typesetting than the average LaTeX document. At least in CS journals. The lines are too long, the font is too dense, and mathematical expressions look wrong. Springer, ACM, and IEEE are a bit better, but LIPIcs conference proceedings (where the author is responsible for typesetting) beat them all.