Skip Navigation

InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)PE
Posts
2
Comments
606
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • First, let me start off by saying that I agree with what I believe your actual premise is (or should be) - that articles in science journals should not be behind paywalls. I’m strictly against the practice, I think it’s a massive scam, and so does everyone I know who does research. I have paid to open source every paper I’ve published. Well, not me personally. But thank you taxpayers for funding me to not only do my work but to make sure you have access to it too. I’ll talk about this more at the end.

    With that out of the way, I’d like to mention a couple of things. First, the scam is on the part of the academic journals, not the researchers or the journalists writing the articles. It’s not part of some scam to hide the fact that the journalist is making crap up. If the authors were unwilling or unable to pay the fees for open sourcing their papers ($3-5k when I was doing it several years ago), then you’re either going to be in an institution that has a subscription to the journal or you’re going to have to find some way of acquiring it.

    Search for the exact title in quotes. Sometimes the Google Scholar engine will return with the default link to the pay walled page, sometimes it’ll have a link to a prepublication server. Arxiv is one of the more popular ones for physics, math, and computer science of all stripes. Step 2 is to go to the institution web page of the first author. Very often, researchers will keep an updated list of their publications with links to the PDFs. If that still doesn’t work, you can write the author and request the paper. We love those emails. We love it when people read our work, especially when they’re so excited that they wrote to request a copy. None of these involve copyright infringement. That prepub that you get is the same paper (usually but you can confirm with the author if that’s a question), but possibly without the masthead and layout from the journal. It’s still cited the same.

    So, why are so many journals behind a paywall? Because the publishers want to monetize what today should be a cost free (or minimal) set of transactions. Here’s what happens:

    1. I have an idea for some research. If it’s good and I’m lucky, I get money from the government (or whomever) to do the work, and I use it to pay my expenses (salaries, materials, equipment, whatever). I also get taxed on it by my institution so they can pay the admins and other costs. When submitting a proposal, those are all line items in your budget. If you’re doing expensive research at an expensive institution, it’s pretty trivial to set aside $10-20k for pub fees. If your entire grant was $35k, that’s a lot harder to justify.
    2. You write the paper after doing the work. You don’t get paid to write the paper specifically - it’s part of the research that you are doing. The point here is that, unlike book authors, researchers see zero of any money you’d pay for the article. If you do locate a copyrighted copy, you’re not taking a dime out of my pocket. Again, just thrilled someone’s reading the damn thing.
    3. You pick a journal and send it in. The journal has a contact list of researchers and their fields, and sends out requests for reviewers. They usually require 2 or 3.
    4. The reviewers read the paper making notes on questions they have and recommend revisions before publication. Reviewing is an unpaid service researchers do because we know that’s how it works. The irony is that it challenges the academic notion of the tragedy of the commons. You could be a freeloader and never review, but enough people do it that the system keeps rolling.
    5. You revise, reviewers approve, publisher accepts and schedules date. There can be some back and forth here (this is a legitimate publisher expense, but the level of effort and interaction isn’t like with a book editor).
    6. Your paper comes out.

    As you can see, the role of the publisher is very small in the overall amount of effort put into getting an idea from my head into yours. At one point publishers had an argument that the small circulation numbers for things like The Journal of Theoretical Biology justified their $21k/year institutional subscription price.

    And I shouldn’t have saved this til the end, but for the one person who skimmed down to see where all of this was going:

    Any science article / press release that cites a paper whether or not you have access to it at least is citing something that has undergone peer review. Peer review can only do so much and journal quality has a wide range, but it’s about the best we have. If it’s a big enough deal to actually matter and the media in question has wide enough reach to care, then it will get back to the author who can then clarify.

  • That’s a good point. China has construction capacity like no place else on earth.

    I also wonder if the technology involved would make this more deployable in the global south due to fewer infrastructure dependencies.

  • From their q&a:

    gitspamdum is a bot, I just created a fake account and bid for 999 trillions, no verification were requested in the whole process and 1 nanosecond later gitspamdum bid after me, I tried this twice, my only purpose was to expose the absurdity of the whole thing, if Proton really take this thing seriously please just cancel all auctions and place them in a serious website

  • I think there’s a fundamental problem with the question that goes to the heart of the climate crisis and which makes a significant contribution to why I think we will not solve it.

    There’s two versions of this question. The first is the one you asked - how much are individuals and families willing to give up in order to make the climate problem go away (whatever that means at this point). The second is “If you knew with 100% accuracy that by you going vegan (or ditching your car or installing solar or composting…), that the climate crisis would definitely be solved, would you do it?

    Let’s pretend that I don’t want to go vegan. I eat Big Macs every night. Porterhouse steaks every weekend. I drive an F-350 to the ice cream store down the block. All of that. Let’s say I love those things. If I personally give them up, it will make no difference if we don’t reorganize the entire global economy. You might convince me to vote for politicians who would pass laws to make that happen, but you’d have a harder time selling me on sacrificing something I see as a core benefit for zero gain. It’s the difference between “How much would you give to get a homeless person off the streets and a new start” and “How much would you give a homeless person if you knew they were just going to set the cash on fire” if you see where I’m going with that.

    We are humans. We are cooperators. That’s how we got where we are. Unfortunately there’s also other dynamics in play as well. I honestly have no idea how far back we’d need to rewind the tape in order to have a chance at a better outcome. I do think any progress we can make is good. This just feels like a boulder rolling towards your house kind of thing where all you can do is watch.

  • People with money tend to trust people with money because their ego tells them how smart they are because of their own success, and they project that onto others.

    Elon is also a brilliant con man, exactly like Donald Trump. They’re so close, it’s uncanny. Elon apparently got $13B in loans from major banks by telling them that his businesses never lose money.

    We will have to see if reality is finally catching up with them.

  • I think I might have been unclear. I’m not saying any state needs to follow BvG. I’m saying that BvG is part of the set of cases saying that the feds have to defer to the states. So, the opposite.

    I do agree there’s a likelihood they’ll try to overthrow the election again, though. I just don’t think there’s any actual legal argument they can make, and if it does go back to the courts, they’ll decide the same way.

    I think the legal argument is closed and Trump will not appear on the ballot absent scotus making a reversal that would make Roe look like child’s play.

    Note: That doesn’t mean that this is over. It means that the next steps are going to be very mask off.

  • I know a number of companies that have introduced exercise programs. In every case it’s clearly done on the employee’s own time, is made accommodating, and the reward for completing your 4000 steps per day or whatever is a tee shirt or something. It’s not that these things can’t be done.

    Plus companies do stupid things that get them sued all the time. Look at Elon.

  • I also can’t see how this doesn’t open them up to lawsuits for any injuries incurred from a sprained ankle to a blown out knee or a heart attack. I’m a manager in a large company, and I got a bit nervous at some of the offsite activities, and those were mild things like dunk tanks. Plus I bet the entertainment company or venue carries that insurance. This is literally making the run part of the job, and it’s a relatively dangerous activity.

  • No, it’s much worse than that. With Trump off the ballot, Biden will automatically win. That’s an automatic 9 point loss for Trump and a 9 point gain for Biden, making Trump start at 18 points down. That’s a lot to make up.

    CO would also largely blue from the senate on down because of a depressed turnout without Trump on the ballot.

  • Agreed.

    And CO has a law stating that their ballots close on Jan 5th, which is why they issued a self-stay through the 4th. That’s the last possible day.

    So it seems to me that if the sc issues its own stay until it can review the case, they have to do the same thing - use the federal govt to force CO to violate their election law.

    They get a constitutional two-fer which is extra fun because we’re only a short time from cases like Bush v Gore and the VRA slashing, which were decided by some of these same judges.

    If they try it, I think we can all look forward to some amazing contortions in legal interpretation.