61–70 of 104 posts
He is attending the wrong library. Library Genesis is the way, now. And Library Sci-Hub. And I am only half-kidding.
And the outcome was ... ACM Transactions on Algorithms (TALG)[1][2] [1] https://home.cs.colorado.edu/~hal/s.pdf [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACM_Transactions_on_Algorithms
> In 2003, the entire editorial board of the Journal of Algorithms resigned to start ACM Transactions on Algorithms with a different, lower-priced, not-for-profit publisher, at the suggestion of Journal of Algorithms founder Donald Knuth. The Journal of Algorithms continued under Elsevier with a new editorial board until October 2009, when it was discontinued.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsevier#Resignation_of_editor...
Sending a working person a 14 page letter about anything expecting them to read it is wild to me. Perhaps it's the quality of my writing but my personal experience is that even being way more concise, most people wouldn't care.
You really cannot understand why Donald Knuth would expect the editorial board of The Journal of Algorithms to read his letter?
It's interesting to note that in the context of this letter about the Journal of Algorithms, that there is now an open-access journal called "Algorithms" which looks like it launched five years after this letter: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/algorithms
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MDPI#Evaluation_and_controvers...
He is attending the wrong library. Library Genesis is the way, now. And Library Sci-Hub. And I am only half-kidding.
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.
He is attending the wrong library. Library Genesis is the way, now. And Library Sci-Hub. And I am only half-kidding.
I’m ok with library Sci-Hub, but less so with Library Genesis. Pirating books reduces the incentives for authors to write more books. Pirating academic articles won’t reduce academics’ incentives to write papers.
The publishers are very comfortable with the high prices they are able to charge the quite expensive American universities.
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. F…
Back then, I had the resources of Indiana University for support. Today, lacking institutional affiliation, I couldn't do research at all - the typical price per paper is $35 from publishers, which is on average something like $2 per page. And why not? They don't have competitors for any given paper, and papers are not fungible.
I'm not independently (or even dependently) wealthy, so I can only do this research using the shadow archives. And the irony of the situation is that the access I get through shadow archives is far, far better than what I had at Indiana University in 1995, where I had to physically go to the library and hope nobody had checked out their copy of a given book, and where I paid 10 cents a page for Xerox copies. (I recently went through my files and found every single article there in PDF online - and burned all the 10-cent pages I'd copied in the 90's. It was ... weird.)
Knuth's right (well, of course; he's Don Knuth, what did I expect?) - the commercial academic publishing industry is holding us all back.
He is attending the wrong library. Library Genesis is the way, now. And Library Sci-Hub. And I am only half-kidding.
I’m ok with library Sci-Hub, but less so with Library Genesis. Pirating books reduces the incentives for authors to write more books. Pirating academic articles won’t reduce academics’ incentives to write papers.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m ok with library Sci-Hub, but less so with Library Genesis. Pirating books reduces the incentives for authors to write more books. Pirating academic articles won’t reduce academics’ incentives to write papers.
Considering certain technical books range between 70 to 300 dollars per copy, and libraries are unable to afford them, it seems to me that the incentive system is already broken. The publishers are very comfortable with the high prices they are able to charge the quite expensive American universities.