All publishing has costs, but those costs are by no means fixed, and neither are the prices. In general, traditional publishers have much higher profit margins than OA publishers do (note the "in general"--you can always find a specific OA publisher that's more profitable than a specific publisher, but I'm talking about trends) and while I don't claim by any means that all academic publishing should be non-profit, I also don't believe that universities and funding agencies should pay any more than necessary to enrich those who want to sit back and collect money for other people's hard work. And electronic-only publishers, or publishers which primarily publish online and offer bound yearly volumes to those who want to pay for them, have signficantly lower costs than paper publishers. So anything that encourages authors to look toward OA and/or electronic publication is a good thing, IMO.
From the other side, for a given cost, there's the question of what you get for a particular amount of money. The OA-after-embargo policies of NIH, MRC, HHMI, and Wellcome Trust have added value to traditional journal publication. There's no journal I know of that says, "We'll publish your article for free, unless you're funded by an agency which requires OA after six months or a year, in which case you have to pay a publication fee." (I'm not saying there aren't any that do this, just that I haven't run into them.) Some of them offer instant OA for a fee comparable to those charged by OA publishers, which is reasonable enough, but you can choose not to pay that fee and your work will still be generally available after the embargo. This makes the research more useful without adding to the cost.
And really, I have no problem with funding agencies paying for publication as well as research, because "publication vs. resarch" is a false dichotomy--publication is part of research; if you don't publish your results you might as well never have done the research at all.
I see. And how many times during the Bush years did we hear Republicans screeching, "B-b-b-but CLINTON!!!" whenever one of their Glorious Leader's many failings was pointed out?
The inability to take what you dish out is one of the most striking characteristics of what passes for modern conservative thinking. It's simultaneously amusing and pathetic, like a three-year-old's rage when he's denied his favorite toy.
BTW, you can Google "presidential vacation days" or some similar phrase and get multiple sources. Arguing in a vacuum on something like this is silly when the data are so readily available. But if you prefer ideological ranting to fact-based debate, hey, have fun with that. (Yeah, yeah, I know, "How long have you been on Slashdot?", etc.)
Okay, here are the facts for you. Short version: Obama has spent far less time on vacation, per time in office, than his predecessor did. In fact, there's a fairly striking pattern among recent Presidents when you look at vacation time by party affiliation...
Will outside of the research community read the publications?
Yes. If you're genuinely interested in science, then relying on pop-sci reporting for your information will drastically mislead you. I don't know how many times I've seen a blurb about some science story on Slashdot, downloaded the original article (one of the advantages of being an academic at a large school that subscribes to most journals of interest) and seen that the summary was completely wrong.
And here's something you may not have thought of: those inside the research community don't always have access either. Like I said, I'm at a large school and have access to most journals I want to read. Occasionally even I run an abstract for something I think would be really useful, but can't get access to. Libraries at smaller schools often don't have nearly as large a subscription list, and of course independent researchers--yes, they do exist--are SOL unless they can pay for everything out of their own pockets. Given the number of articles you have to read in the preparation of a single paper these days, that gets very expensive very fast.
To give the journal publishers time to make money. That's pretty much all there is to it. Like I said in my previous post on this story, it's not a perfect solution by any means, but given the strength of the journal lobby it's the best we're going to get.
It's not perfect, but it's a big step forward. The first year of a paper's "life" is important, to be sure, but it doesn't mean the time after that is unimportant--I just submitted a paper with citations going back to 1970! So far the NIH open access policy has worked out pretty well. And the simple fact is that without some embargo period, the journal lobby would have gone insane... and unfortunately, they've got enough of a voice in Congress to ensure that any requirement for instant open access would be shot down hard. This move, OTOH, will create some grumbling, but any attempt to reverse it by law will meet the same political fate that previous attempts to reverse the NIH policy have done, probably dying in committee without ever even making it to a floor vote. Which is, you know, a good thing. This may be a mediocre result for science, but Obama's a politician, not a scientist, and it's very good politics indeed. To quote another cliche, "half a loaf is better than none."
If there's anything I'm worried about, it's the usual list of "security" exemptions. There's some research which, for security reasons, never gets published in any journals, of course. (I've heard rumors that NSA has its own list of "journals" that are only ever seen by NSA mathematicians--they run exactly like journals in the outside world, just with a very limited audience. I have no idea if this is true, but it's believable given the sheer amount of brainpower NSA employs.) That's understandable, if annoying. But if an article is published in a journal that's available to the world as a whole, then claiming that keeping it paywalled contributes to "national, homeland, and economic security" in any way is absurd.
The mens rea of theft, in both the common law and most state laws, is the intent to deprive the owner of their right PERMANENTLY. If you took your neighbor's TV and you genuinely mean to give it back, it is not theft.
Hmmm, okay. This may be one of the (regrettably many) cases where the average person's understanding of a word differs from what lawyers mean by that word. Let's put it this way: if I were the guy whose TV had just disappeared, I'd certainly consider my neighbor a thief no matter what he claimed he intended to do with the item.
The only place I know of where the law makes a distinction between temporary and permanent "theft" is with respect to automobiles, in that joyriding is a lesser offense than, say, breaking into a car and taking a car to a chop shop. But IANAL, etc. Are there other legal distinctions of this nature?
The guy refused to sign the import documents which would release the boat and then is surprised when they didn't release the boat?
He refused to commit perjury, and was then surprised--as most people would be--when he was punished for his refusal to commit perjury. How hard is this to understand?
Whenever there's a "copyright infringement!=theft" post, people here love to point out that the definition of theft is that you're permanently depriving someone of their property.
This isn't theft.
No, the definition of theft is taking something, without permission, that doesn't belong to you. Try taking your neighbor's TV and then explaining to the cops, "I just wanted to watch this one show, I'll give it back when I'm done." In cases of copyright infringement, there is no "taking," therefore no theft. Here, a physical item was taken. Can you really not see the difference here?
Okay, I'm puzzled. Do we know each other outside of/.?
All I'm saying is that it seems to me that posting under a screen name isn't a whole lot different from posting as AC, in terms of willingness to reveal your identity and stand by your words. You may have a certain amount of reputation and karma to gain or lose, but that's about it. Now, when I signed on to/. using my real name, it wasn't a deliberate act of courage or anything like that--I just didn't even think about coming up with a screen name--but in retrospect, I do take a certain amount of pride in it. My opinions are out there with my name attached to them for all the world to see, and I think I write more carefully and thoughtfully than I would under a pseudonym.
I bet when all the kids were super-excited about programming on the i386 with its "OMG VIRTUAL MEMORY!!!" the older guys who had worked on mainframes just rolled their eyes.:)
Well, it was super-exciting to have it on the desktop for a reasonable price, yeah. I can't speak for everyone of that generation, but I appreciated it while still understanding perfectly well that it wasn't a new invention.
Yes, I'm sure your parents were so proud when they looked down at you squalling in your crib and said, "We'll call him WindBourne, that's such a wonderful name!"
If you screwed up like this in company, you would be fired boilerplate anti-government yammering blah blah blah
When you get out of high school and have your first job that doesn't involve cleaning a grease trap, you'll learn how things actually work in the corporate world.
95% of the world has no fucking clue what python the programming language is, nevermind it's "importance"!
95% of the world as a whole? Probably, yeah. 95% of the IT world? Not so much. If you're in the computing biz and you have no fucking clue what the Python programming language is, then you have no fucking clue period, and you are too fucking stupid to be allowed around a fucking computer to do anything except browse the fucking web and play fucking video games, you ignorant fuck.
Everyone, on both sides, knows that "denier" is the chosen term specifically because it parallels "holocaust denier".
No. People on one side of the argument use the word "denialism" because it accurately describes the practice of refusing to accept overwhelming evidence. People on the other side of the argument shriek "our opponents are calling us Nazis!" because it makes them feel better about their own ideologically imposed blindness.
If you honestly believe that any use of the verb "to deny" in any context is akin to calling someone a Nazi, you've already shown that you have no interest in rational debate.
"Skeptic" is not an accurate word for people who refuse to accept overwhelming scientific evidence. "Denialist" is. Deal with it.
People who live in cities often are so full of themselves that they think only they know what's good for city dwellers as well as those who live in the country and they tend to impose legislation without having the slightest bit of experience living in the country.
But of course the reverse never happens. Nope. Those pure honest virtuous salt-of-the-earth country folk just naturally know by common sense what's best for everybody.
Slashdot Mirror
Had they done that, the courts likely would have sided with them.
Keep telling yourself that if it makes it easier for you to sleep at night.
All publishing has costs, but those costs are by no means fixed, and neither are the prices. In general, traditional publishers have much higher profit margins than OA publishers do (note the "in general"--you can always find a specific OA publisher that's more profitable than a specific publisher, but I'm talking about trends) and while I don't claim by any means that all academic publishing should be non-profit, I also don't believe that universities and funding agencies should pay any more than necessary to enrich those who want to sit back and collect money for other people's hard work. And electronic-only publishers, or publishers which primarily publish online and offer bound yearly volumes to those who want to pay for them, have signficantly lower costs than paper publishers. So anything that encourages authors to look toward OA and/or electronic publication is a good thing, IMO.
From the other side, for a given cost, there's the question of what you get for a particular amount of money. The OA-after-embargo policies of NIH, MRC, HHMI, and Wellcome Trust have added value to traditional journal publication. There's no journal I know of that says, "We'll publish your article for free, unless you're funded by an agency which requires OA after six months or a year, in which case you have to pay a publication fee." (I'm not saying there aren't any that do this, just that I haven't run into them.) Some of them offer instant OA for a fee comparable to those charged by OA publishers, which is reasonable enough, but you can choose not to pay that fee and your work will still be generally available after the embargo. This makes the research more useful without adding to the cost.
And really, I have no problem with funding agencies paying for publication as well as research, because "publication vs. resarch" is a false dichotomy--publication is part of research; if you don't publish your results you might as well never have done the research at all.
I see. And how many times during the Bush years did we hear Republicans screeching, "B-b-b-but CLINTON!!!" whenever one of their Glorious Leader's many failings was pointed out?
The inability to take what you dish out is one of the most striking characteristics of what passes for modern conservative thinking. It's simultaneously amusing and pathetic, like a three-year-old's rage when he's denied his favorite toy.
BTW, you can Google "presidential vacation days" or some similar phrase and get multiple sources. Arguing in a vacuum on something like this is silly when the data are so readily available. But if you prefer ideological ranting to fact-based debate, hey, have fun with that. (Yeah, yeah, I know, "How long have you been on Slashdot?", etc.)
Okay, here are the facts for you. Short version: Obama has spent far less time on vacation, per time in office, than his predecessor did. In fact, there's a fairly striking pattern among recent Presidents when you look at vacation time by party affiliation ...
Will outside of the research community read the publications?
Yes. If you're genuinely interested in science, then relying on pop-sci reporting for your information will drastically mislead you. I don't know how many times I've seen a blurb about some science story on Slashdot, downloaded the original article (one of the advantages of being an academic at a large school that subscribes to most journals of interest) and seen that the summary was completely wrong.
And here's something you may not have thought of: those inside the research community don't always have access either. Like I said, I'm at a large school and have access to most journals I want to read. Occasionally even I run an abstract for something I think would be really useful, but can't get access to. Libraries at smaller schools often don't have nearly as large a subscription list, and of course independent researchers--yes, they do exist--are SOL unless they can pay for everything out of their own pockets. Given the number of articles you have to read in the preparation of a single paper these days, that gets very expensive very fast.
To give the journal publishers time to make money. That's pretty much all there is to it. Like I said in my previous post on this story, it's not a perfect solution by any means, but given the strength of the journal lobby it's the best we're going to get.
It's not perfect, but it's a big step forward. The first year of a paper's "life" is important, to be sure, but it doesn't mean the time after that is unimportant--I just submitted a paper with citations going back to 1970! So far the NIH open access policy has worked out pretty well. And the simple fact is that without some embargo period, the journal lobby would have gone insane ... and unfortunately, they've got enough of a voice in Congress to ensure that any requirement for instant open access would be shot down hard. This move, OTOH, will create some grumbling, but any attempt to reverse it by law will meet the same political fate that previous attempts to reverse the NIH policy have done, probably dying in committee without ever even making it to a floor vote. Which is, you know, a good thing. This may be a mediocre result for science, but Obama's a politician, not a scientist, and it's very good politics indeed. To quote another cliche, "half a loaf is better than none."
If there's anything I'm worried about, it's the usual list of "security" exemptions. There's some research which, for security reasons, never gets published in any journals, of course. (I've heard rumors that NSA has its own list of "journals" that are only ever seen by NSA mathematicians--they run exactly like journals in the outside world, just with a very limited audience. I have no idea if this is true, but it's believable given the sheer amount of brainpower NSA employs.) That's understandable, if annoying. But if an article is published in a journal that's available to the world as a whole, then claiming that keeping it paywalled contributes to "national, homeland, and economic security" in any way is absurd.
The mens rea of theft, in both the common law and most state laws, is the intent to deprive the owner of their right PERMANENTLY. If you took your neighbor's TV and you genuinely mean to give it back, it is not theft.
Hmmm, okay. This may be one of the (regrettably many) cases where the average person's understanding of a word differs from what lawyers mean by that word. Let's put it this way: if I were the guy whose TV had just disappeared, I'd certainly consider my neighbor a thief no matter what he claimed he intended to do with the item.
The only place I know of where the law makes a distinction between temporary and permanent "theft" is with respect to automobiles, in that joyriding is a lesser offense than, say, breaking into a car and taking a car to a chop shop. But IANAL, etc. Are there other legal distinctions of this nature?
The guy refused to sign the import documents which would release the boat and then is surprised when they didn't release the boat?
He refused to commit perjury, and was then surprised--as most people would be--when he was punished for his refusal to commit perjury. How hard is this to understand?
Whenever there's a "copyright infringement!=theft" post, people here love to point out that the definition of theft is that you're permanently depriving someone of their property.
This isn't theft.
No, the definition of theft is taking something, without permission, that doesn't belong to you. Try taking your neighbor's TV and then explaining to the cops, "I just wanted to watch this one show, I'll give it back when I'm done." In cases of copyright infringement, there is no "taking," therefore no theft. Here, a physical item was taken. Can you really not see the difference here?
Well said.
the world MMA champion doesn't go around picking fights with enraged crocodiles
Although I have to say, I'd pay good money to watch a match like that.
Hah! Good point. :)
Okay, I'm puzzled. Do we know each other outside of /.?
All I'm saying is that it seems to me that posting under a screen name isn't a whole lot different from posting as AC, in terms of willingness to reveal your identity and stand by your words. You may have a certain amount of reputation and karma to gain or lose, but that's about it. Now, when I signed on to /. using my real name, it wasn't a deliberate act of courage or anything like that--I just didn't even think about coming up with a screen name--but in retrospect, I do take a certain amount of pride in it. My opinions are out there with my name attached to them for all the world to see, and I think I write more carefully and thoughtfully than I would under a pseudonym.
I bet when all the kids were super-excited about programming on the i386 with its "OMG VIRTUAL MEMORY!!!" the older guys who had worked on mainframes just rolled their eyes. :)
Well, it was super-exciting to have it on the desktop for a reasonable price, yeah. I can't speak for everyone of that generation, but I appreciated it while still understanding perfectly well that it wasn't a new invention.
Hell, you have to hide who you are.
Yes, I'm sure your parents were so proud when they looked down at you squalling in your crib and said, "We'll call him WindBourne, that's such a wonderful name!"
If you screwed up like this in company, you would be fired boilerplate anti-government yammering blah blah blah
When you get out of high school and have your first job that doesn't involve cleaning a grease trap, you'll learn how things actually work in the corporate world.
Utility, novelty, and non-obviousness. This patent clearly fails at least one of these conditions.
95% of the world has no fucking clue what python the programming language is, nevermind it's "importance"!
95% of the world as a whole? Probably, yeah. 95% of the IT world? Not so much. If you're in the computing biz and you have no fucking clue what the Python programming language is, then you have no fucking clue period, and you are too fucking stupid to be allowed around a fucking computer to do anything except browse the fucking web and play fucking video games, you ignorant fuck.
Everyone, on both sides, knows that "denier" is the chosen term specifically because it parallels "holocaust denier".
No. People on one side of the argument use the word "denialism" because it accurately describes the practice of refusing to accept overwhelming evidence. People on the other side of the argument shriek "our opponents are calling us Nazis!" because it makes them feel better about their own ideologically imposed blindness.
don't demonize them as neo-Holocaust deniers
If you honestly believe that any use of the verb "to deny" in any context is akin to calling someone a Nazi, you've already shown that you have no interest in rational debate.
"Skeptic" is not an accurate word for people who refuse to accept overwhelming scientific evidence. "Denialist" is. Deal with it.
People who live in cities often are so full of themselves that they think only they know what's good for city dwellers as well as those who live in the country and they tend to impose legislation without having the slightest bit of experience living in the country.
But of course the reverse never happens. Nope. Those pure honest virtuous salt-of-the-earth country folk just naturally know by common sense what's best for everybody.
Slashdotters in general
And by "Slashdotters in general," you of course mean "me and people who think just like me."
Example I notice today on Slashdot: ... which students are graded on ... ... on which students are graded ...
should be:
So, how's life in the Roman Empire?