Don Knuth letter about libraries increasingly unable to afford prices (2003) [pdf]

Well, how long do we work on some slide decks to convince management? How much we polish them aesthetically? This is a scientist working to convince a management board. So he puts effort in it and tries to make a convincing pitch.

Just a different media ;)

I once emailed Dijkstra. I was 14, it was the mid 90s, and I had just connected to the real internet a few months ago. I had just come across his name as a prominent computer scientist. I wanted to be one just like him, so I asked him what I should do.

He replied. it was 3 full paragraphs. He told me to study algorithms and to learn python.

You're right. I absolutely should frame it.

And annas-archive

Some rants from the foxhole.

American Chemical Society is the one of the main publishers in molecular sciences. Researchers at Finnish universities haven't been able to access articles published after 2023 after failed negotiations [0], greatly hindering one's - and collectively the nation's - ability to progress in these fields. It's quite frustrating, shocking, and eye-opening to have this rug pulled beneath you.

Finland is not a poor country, and the situation is surely worse elsewhere. Nonetheless, our economy and the academic funding situation is quite crappy and getting crappier. In 2022, Finnish university library consortium spent ~25M€ for subscriptions [3]. Last year, the negotiated sum for seven main publishers was ~16M€, inc the failed ACS deal. One can easily imagine better ways to use the dozens of millions.

Science is expensive and inequalities between countries/uni's/wherever are a n unfortunate fact of the world. Not every player can pay millions to get the 10M€ Cryo-EM machine, and thus can't compete in advancing knowledge frontier in this.

To some extent, constraints cultivate creativity. One can still participate through collaboration, theoretical and computational work, creative crafting of experiments with already existing equipment (& with fascinating DIY low-cost open-science hardwarex stuff!)

However, one must know the giants on whose shoulders one stands on, and the game played by the behemoth publishers attacks this fundament. The consequence - inequality in accessing knowledge is deeply disgusting in its artificiality.

Meanwhile, people at eg. MIT are able to get the whole ACS corpus in sweet delicious machine readable XML [3]. In the same time it takes for the "poor" researcher to get one email requested watermarked pdf with detached figures that they excitedly share to their group, a Boston grad student can curl terabytes and science-of-science/NLP/RAG the shit out of it.

Gap exists and grows with the arbitrarily increasing costs. Something needs to change, but for now, I'm cynical. Strong will get stronger and so on.

Thank god for open science movement living on github and *rxivs, and for the risky work taken on by shadow librarians.

[0] https://finelib.fi/sopimus-acsn-kanssa-paattynyt/

[1] https://www.kiwi.fi/display/finelib/Vuosikertomukset

[2] https://finelib.fi/kustannukset-saatava-kuriin-tiedelehtien-...

[3] https://libraries.mit.edu/scholarly/publishing/text-and-data...

That's honestly quite tragic as we don't evolve anywhere fast enough to not be hit by global depression as the digital solitude clashes with the innate human needs of real socialization.