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Nearly All Particle Physics Research To Be Open Access
ananyo writes with great news for particle physicists and those interested in the field everywhere: "The entire field of particle physics is set to switch to open-access publishing, a milestone in the push to make research results freely available to readers. Particle physics is already a paragon of openness, with most papers posted on the preprint server arXiv. But peer-reviewed versions are still published in subscription journals, and publishers and research consortia at facilities such as the Large Hadron Collider have previously had to strike piecemeal deals to free up a few hundred articles. After six years of negotiation, the Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics is now close to ensuring that nearly all particle-physics articles — about 7,000 publications last year — are made immediately free on journal websites. Upfront payments from libraries will fund the access and the contracts will be renegotiated in 2016. The idea of all this maneuvering is to minimize the hassle for the scientists themselves and ensure that every paper is open access. The alternative is the 'author pays' model, where the researchers pay to publish. But that would require all authors to comply — a difficult rule to enforce. The new deal, however, also preserves publishers' profits — for now."
Reprint books from 1600-1923, then - copyright's expired.
Then don't pay £30. Get it from a library. That's why they're there.
... it strikes me as unnecessarily playing ball with the journal publishers. I'd rather see OA simply enforced by the funding agencies. In my field, bioinformatics, the bulk of the funding in the US and UK comes from four sources: NIH (US government), MRC (UK government), HHMI (US private foundation), and Wellcome Trust (UK private foundation). All of them have open access policies for publications prepared with their money, and they don't much care how you do it: you can post the article in a public repository regardless of how it was published, publish in an OA journal--for which the funding agency will generally pay the publication fee--or publish in a traditional journal and make sure the publisher makes a copy freely available. You can bet the publishers grumble about that last one, but they've mostly gone along with the requirement, because the alternative is saying "we won't publish papers describing research funded by ___," and if they did that they'd cease to exist.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Virtually all fields have a lot of introductory (and advanced) information online for free from various sources, from guitar instruction, to particle physics, to electrical engineering. If you're interested in self-learning, there isn't any need to buy anything (besides an internet connection).
Go back to Roman numerals, see how you like that.
.: Semper Absurda
Open access journals like BioMed Central, PLoS, Oxford's OA journals, etc. all prove a OA business model can be successful (and profitable) if structured well.
Also by charging authors ~$1k per publication. But keep in mind that subscription fee journals typically charge hundreds of dollars for color and extra pages (e.g. most IEEE Transactions journals charges $300 per page over 8).
.: Semper Absurda
I have no problem with Hindu numerals:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindu-Arabic_Numerals ..
Etymology
The Hindu-Arabic numerals were invented in India and thus called "Hindu numerals" by Persian mathematician Khowarizmi. They were later called "Arabic" numerals by Europeans, because they were introduced in the West by Arabs of North Africa.[3]
So the so-called arabic numerals are Hindu ! :)
Joke is on them. It's all strings poeple... STRINGS!!!
If only these guys had designed the World Wide Web!
As a guitar teacher I have met many of these travesties. It often takes *months* of work and correction to break the terrible playing-position and rhythmic faults. I've also seen a few book-schooled players who learned to play execute wrapped-thumb-tapped basslines while plucking melody and harmony in counterpoint but those are the pleasant exceptions.
I have yet to see a book which teaches the entire skillset of the true essentials of the instrument. I might have to remedy that myself.
Ever notice that Cobra Commander sounds an awful lot like Star scream?
While some of the fundamental physics hasn't changed in the last century, a lot of the applications and examples have changed considerably. And the teaching methods and conciseness of some of the math and language has improved quite a bit. That said, the repeated editions of books that change questions only to force people to buy the same edition are a rip off and scam.
As a physicist, my reaction to this article is ... huh?
Among physicists, putting all your papers on arxiv.org has been standard since about 1999. I basically *never* need to go anywhere but arxiv for anything published in this century. The only exception I can think of is papers published in Nature, which always seem to be paywalled and not available on arxiv. I assume Nature is very stone-age and forces authors not to post on arxiv. But anyway, Nature isn't really a big venue for physics publications. I teach at a community college, so I have no access to subscription-based journals. Whenever a paper is paywalled, I need to drive to the nearest 4-year university and photocopy it. This basically only happens when I'm looking up golden oldies from decades ago.
What would be news would be if other fields besides math and physics started to do this.
Find free books.
So basically you just think that educators should work for free?