"What on earth would keep a bunch of well funded liars like American Heritage Institute from buying up all the articles they want?"
Peer-review. PeerJ is particularly good on this, in that it allows the whole peer-review history of papers to be published alongside the final version: the original submission, the reviews, the handling editor's decision, the authors' rebuttal letter and revision, subsequent editorial comments, etc. As an example, you can see this audit trail for our own PeerJ paper on sauropod necks.
I agree that what we really want is a system where the price of publishing is part of the price of doing research. That is what we're moving towards as funding bodies increasingly allow publication fees to be covered by their grants.
But even without this, charging to publish is much better than charging to read, because it's a non-monopoly market. When Elsevier charge $40 to read one of their articles, a reader doesn't have the choice of going to a different publisher: no other publisher has the specific article the reader needs. But when they charge $3000 to publish my article I can go to any rival that offers similar services, and find one that instead charges $1350 (PLOS ONE) or $99 (PeerJ).
Check the PeerJ site. Peer-reviewers are chosen by an academic editor -- standard practice at scholarly journals. There is a board of 800 academic editors (PeerJ's planning to get big, quickly). That large board is overseen by a much smaller senior board to 20 scientists (of whom five have Nobel prizes to their names). It's serious stuff.
I am the Mike Taylor that is the lead author of this study. As pointed out by MaXintosh, the paper itself is freely available from the open-access journal Acta Palaeontologica Polonica, and we urge everyone who's interested to read it for themselves: we kept it short and made efforts to keep it comprehensible to intelligent non-specialists. It's at http://www.app.pan.pl/article/item/app54-213.html
Also, if the article pointed to here is Slashdotted, there is A LOT of other media coverage out there, including a TV interview, seven radio interviews, at least 25 online news sources and at least 14 blogs. Handily, we've linked them all from a page on our own blog, which you can find at http://svpow.wordpress.com/papers-by-sv-powsketeers/taylor-et-al-2009-on-neck-posture/
And maybe best, that blog -- Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week -- now has a sequence of seven posts explaining the research in more detail: these too are linked from the page I mentioned, and I think many Slashdotters will find them interesting.
To respond to a couple of specific points that have been raised in the comments here:
1. TinBromide though we compared only with giraffes, but in fact we compared with LOTS of animals, including birds, crocs, lizards, turtles, mammals and amphibians. The result were compellingly uniform. Similarly, MaXintosh wrote that "the authors (of the paper, not TFA) hedge their bets heavily by saying that IF sauropods are directly comparable to extant taxa". Well, sort of: we did rather nail our colours to the mast when we wrote "Can the habitual posture of extant amniotes be expected to apply to sauropods? Phylogenetic bracketing strongly supports this hypothesis as the neck posture described by Vidal et al. (1986) is found in both Aves and Crocodylia, the nearest extant outgroups of Sauropoda, as well as in the increasingly remote outgroups Squamata, Testudines and Lissamphibia."
2. eldavojohn asked "Why are we arguing over which position was the default when it's entirely possible that they utilized both positions" and noted that "There's plenty of pictures on Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] of the animals depicted both ways." It's true, of course, that animals can and do adopt different postures at different times: we make the point in the paper that sauropods had to be able to get their heads down low in order to drink, and could therefore pass through all intermediate postures. What we're talking about here is HABITUAL posture -- they way they spent their time when not actively doing something different. Geese can reach the ground, but they don't spend their lives that way.
3. A few people mentioned the problem of pumping blood up a high neck to the brain. We can't say too much about this at the moment as we're working on a paper on this subject and don't want to scoop ourselves. However, we do have good reason to think that the blood-pressure problem is not so severe as it's been depicted in Roger Seymour's work (going back as far as 1976, so we're well aware of it!) Sorry if that sounds evasive: hopefully we'll have a more convincing response for you within a year or so.
4. Finally, we want to be clear that we don't think our paper ends the debate. If anything, it re-opens it, as horizontal-to-dropping sauropod necks have been orthodox for the last decade or so. There's more work to do (but we're on the case!)
That's all for now -- hope it helps. If you have any more questions, you're welcome to ask, and we'll do our best to answer. The best place to do is probably over on Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week, as I and my co-authors each check that several times a day. http://svpow.wordpress.com/
Has the issue ever run its full course, human rights battling the law?
I don't know. That would be interesting: an author having sold his copyright to a publisher, then asserting his human right to the copyright anyway. I've not heard of such a case, and I have no idea how it would turn out. My money would be on the publisher, though:-P
Is there really any reason why government-funded research shouldn't be made available to the masses? After all, wasn't it the masses who paid for the research?
Yes, there is a reason -- but not a good one. Very big publishing houses such as Elsevier have a huge financial interest in maintaining the status quo, whereby government-funded researchers donate their work for free to the publishers, who then make a large profit by printing and selling it. It is typical (though not universal) for the publishers also to take the copyright of the papers they publish. To add insult to injury, it's not ususual for the publishers to CHARGE THE AUTHORS for the privilege of donating their work -- usually a fixed amount per page above some predefined page limit.
The whole academic publishing game is a racket of the most egregious kind, and the Open Access movement is a very badly needed antidote to the way things are. Scott Aaronson has written
a scathing analogy to the current situation which I strongly encourage everyone to read (not least because it's funny).
No, this is not at all like Wikipedia. It's about peer-reviewed research, created by professionals in the field, and it's about taking this publicly funded work out of the hands of private publishers and giving to back to the people who paid for it.
As Linux enters the mainstream, adopters 'are demanding many features found on commercial software, including a large variety of add-on application programs and management tools that are easy to use,' the Wall Street Journal reports
sigh...
This equation is so simple that I cannot for the life of me understand how business types can not Get It. Open source software that is fun to write, gets written for fun. If people want open source programmers to work on stuff that is not fun, then they need to PAY THE PROGRAMMERS TO DO IT! That's all. Stop thinking that just because we've given you a free lunch, we owe you free dinner and cocktails, too.
Same applies to everyone who whines about Linux not being "ready for the desktop", because the OS hackers can't be bothered to build pretty UIs. That's because UI twiddling isn't Fun. So if you want us to do it, pay us - just like you would pay anyone else to do anything else that they don't particularly want to do.
Once more, they've got you just where they want you, using their terminology and so gradually succumbing to their way of thinking. This article is not about measuring LEGAL downloads at all, but about measuring PAY-FOR dowloads. P2P filesharing networks are used to download immense quantities materialy legally: public domain material, stuff that's out of copyright, tracks released by bands who active encourage downloading. Most recently and visibly, of course, the BBC's Beethoven symphonies. None of this important traffic is counted under the heading of "legal downloads" because none of it lines the pockets of the RIAA and their buddies. But WE DON'T HAVE TO PLAY ALONG with their fiction that nothing that doesn't give them money is legal! Please, folks. Let's get our terminology right.
So, why don't we just accept all reasonable suggestions to make everybody happy? There are too many suggestions to analyze and adequately specify. If we accepted all suggestions there would be six or seven ways of doing anything in C++, rather than just two or three.
Here is the slightly worrying meat of the matter (from TFA):
Some 178 amendments to the bill were tabled by lawmakers before the vote. In the end parliament decided to vote down the law, fearing the amendments would dilute it and make it an inadequate compromise.
"It was a mess. Better no directive than a bad directive," said Tony Robinson, spokesman for the Socialists.
EICTA, a group representing 10,000 companies including giants such as Nokia and Alcatel SA which had been lobbying for the bill, said the decision to scrap it was wise, given the large number of amendments that threatened to severely narrow the scope of the legislation.
So it seems that the bill was not voted down because the anti-SWPAT people were able to persuade the voters of the rightness of their cause, but that it was spammed with amendments until it collapsed under its own weight.
Still a good thing, of course, but it would have been nicer to have this stupid idea explicitly faced down.
Do you actually know any non-geeks?
Because the ones I know would not find an
eight-word "explanation" using the terms
"DNS TTL" and "IP TTL" enormously helpful!:-)
I don't think so; at least, I think that's only true if you take an overly literal reading of the cartoon. The point it's making is that you always make a trade-off between the freedom to do Cool Stuff and the intimacy of developed and dependent relationships -- with kids as well as spouses. For a lot of people (me included) it's a trade worth making. I hate it that I can't really go skiing any more, but the rewards of being thoroughly married with three children so totally make up for it that, really, that hardship is lost in the noise. YMMV.
They're starting to have success with automatic clustering of concepts, so that pages can match even if none of the words in your query actually appear on the page.
I hate that. Don't you hate that? When you type in a search keyword, isn't it because you want that keyword to appear in the documents you find?
This "find tangentially related documents" feature will be fine so long as they make it optional and set it to be off by default. Otherwise, I don't want their idea of what pages I should be looking at polluting my results list.
I just don't get it. What kind of moronic company would pay money to "advertise" its product by irritating the heck out of everyone who sees it? If there is a more cast-iron way of making me hate a product so much that I will never buy it, it's by having it get in my face when I am trying to read something.
These "floaters" remind me of that childish thing where someone leaps around thrusting their hands in front of your face going, "Not touching! Can't get mad!" Oh, yeah. That behaviour is really going to make me want to buy your product.
Since "floater" is (in England, anyway) slang for a turd that can't be flushed away, the name is at least appropriate.
Three and a bit years ago, as a satire on the absurd over-enthusiasm for all things XML that was then taking over the world, I invented a parody language, XMC. Guess what? The over-enthusiasm for XML has continued unabated and now has taken over the world. And so life imitates art.
Slashdot Mirror
Peer-review. PeerJ is particularly good on this, in that it allows the whole peer-review history of papers to be published alongside the final version: the original submission, the reviews, the handling editor's decision, the authors' rebuttal letter and revision, subsequent editorial comments, etc. As an example, you can see this audit trail for our own PeerJ paper on sauropod necks.
I agree that what we really want is a system where the price of publishing is part of the price of doing research. That is what we're moving towards as funding bodies increasingly allow publication fees to be covered by their grants. But even without this, charging to publish is much better than charging to read, because it's a non-monopoly market. When Elsevier charge $40 to read one of their articles, a reader doesn't have the choice of going to a different publisher: no other publisher has the specific article the reader needs. But when they charge $3000 to publish my article I can go to any rival that offers similar services, and find one that instead charges $1350 (PLOS ONE) or $99 (PeerJ).
Check the PeerJ site. Peer-reviewers are chosen by an academic editor -- standard practice at scholarly journals. There is a board of 800 academic editors (PeerJ's planning to get big, quickly). That large board is overseen by a much smaller senior board to 20 scientists (of whom five have Nobel prizes to their names). It's serious stuff.
No indeed, Don Knuth has surely never heard of me. Sorry if I gave that impression, I didn't mean to.
Also, if the article pointed to here is Slashdotted, there is A LOT of other media coverage out there, including a TV interview, seven radio interviews, at least 25 online news sources and at least 14 blogs. Handily, we've linked them all from a page on our own blog, which you can find at http://svpow.wordpress.com/papers-by-sv-powsketeers/taylor-et-al-2009-on-neck-posture/
And maybe best, that blog -- Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week -- now has a sequence of seven posts explaining the research in more detail: these too are linked from the page I mentioned, and I think many Slashdotters will find them interesting.
To respond to a couple of specific points that have been raised in the comments here:
1. TinBromide though we compared only with giraffes, but in fact we compared with LOTS of animals, including birds, crocs, lizards, turtles, mammals and amphibians. The result were compellingly uniform. Similarly, MaXintosh wrote that "the authors (of the paper, not TFA) hedge their bets heavily by saying that IF sauropods are directly comparable to extant taxa". Well, sort of: we did rather nail our colours to the mast when we wrote "Can the habitual posture of extant amniotes be expected to apply to sauropods? Phylogenetic bracketing strongly supports this hypothesis as the neck posture described by Vidal et al. (1986) is found in both Aves and Crocodylia, the nearest extant outgroups of Sauropoda, as well as in the increasingly remote outgroups Squamata, Testudines and Lissamphibia."
2. eldavojohn asked "Why are we arguing over which position was the default when it's entirely possible that they utilized both positions" and noted that "There's plenty of pictures on Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] of the animals depicted both ways." It's true, of course, that animals can and do adopt different postures at different times: we make the point in the paper that sauropods had to be able to get their heads down low in order to drink, and could therefore pass through all intermediate postures. What we're talking about here is HABITUAL posture -- they way they spent their time when not actively doing something different. Geese can reach the ground, but they don't spend their lives that way.
3. A few people mentioned the problem of pumping blood up a high neck to the brain. We can't say too much about this at the moment as we're working on a paper on this subject and don't want to scoop ourselves. However, we do have good reason to think that the blood-pressure problem is not so severe as it's been depicted in Roger Seymour's work (going back as far as 1976, so we're well aware of it!) Sorry if that sounds evasive: hopefully we'll have a more convincing response for you within a year or so.
4. Finally, we want to be clear that we don't think our paper ends the debate. If anything, it re-opens it, as horizontal-to-dropping sauropod necks have been orthodox for the last decade or so. There's more work to do (but we're on the case!)
That's all for now -- hope it helps. If you have any more questions, you're welcome to ask, and we'll do our best to answer. The best place to do is probably over on Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week, as I and my co-authors each check that several times a day. http://svpow.wordpress.com/
I don't know. That would be interesting: an author having sold his copyright to a publisher, then asserting his human right to the copyright anyway. I've not heard of such a case, and I have no idea how it would turn out. My money would be on the publisher, though :-P
Well, yes ... you are confused :-)
On an abstract ethical level, I more or less agree with you. But legally, you are dead wrong. Companies can, and do, take copyright from authors. Not just academic publishers, either. Many, perhaps most, publishers require you to sign an explicit disclaimer that transfers copyright to them. That's why, for example, my little paper of dinosaur taxonomy has a banner saying "© 2005 University of California Museum of Paleontology". So far as the law is concerned, copyright is just another piece of property, which can be bought and sold just like a used car.
That's the way the world is. But there are honourable exceptions. For example, articles published in Zoologica Scripta bear the legend "© 2006 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2006 The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters".
Yes, there is a reason -- but not a good one. Very big publishing houses such as Elsevier have a huge financial interest in maintaining the status quo, whereby government-funded researchers donate their work for free to the publishers, who then make a large profit by printing and selling it. It is typical (though not universal) for the publishers also to take the copyright of the papers they publish. To add insult to injury, it's not ususual for the publishers to CHARGE THE AUTHORS for the privilege of donating their work -- usually a fixed amount per page above some predefined page limit.
The whole academic publishing game is a racket of the most egregious kind, and the Open Access movement is a very badly needed antidote to the way things are. Scott Aaronson has written a scathing analogy to the current situation which I strongly encourage everyone to read (not least because it's funny).
No, this is not at all like Wikipedia. It's about peer-reviewed research, created by professionals in the field, and it's about taking this publicly funded work out of the hands of private publishers and giving to back to the people who paid for it.
How has no-one modded this "funny"?
sigh ...
This equation is so simple that I cannot for the life of me understand how business types can not Get It. Open source software that is fun to write, gets written for fun. If people want open source programmers to work on stuff that is not fun, then they need to PAY THE PROGRAMMERS TO DO IT! That's all. Stop thinking that just because we've given you a free lunch, we owe you free dinner and cocktails, too.
Same applies to everyone who whines about Linux not being "ready for the desktop", because the OS hackers can't be bothered to build pretty UIs. That's because UI twiddling isn't Fun. So if you want us to do it, pay us - just like you would pay anyone else to do anything else that they don't particularly want to do.
Which is the complicated part of this?
Once more, they've got you just where they want you, using their terminology and so gradually succumbing to their way of thinking. This article is not about measuring LEGAL downloads at all, but about measuring PAY-FOR dowloads. P2P filesharing networks are used to download immense quantities materialy legally: public domain material, stuff that's out of copyright, tracks released by bands who active encourage downloading. Most recently and visibly, of course, the BBC's Beethoven symphonies. None of this important traffic is counted under the heading of "legal downloads" because none of it lines the pockets of the RIAA and their buddies. But WE DON'T HAVE TO PLAY ALONG with their fiction that nothing that doesn't give them money is legal! Please, folks. Let's get our terminology right.
Here is the slightly worrying meat of the matter (from TFA):
So it seems that the bill was not voted down because the anti-SWPAT people were able to persuade the voters of the rightness of their cause, but that it was spammed with amendments until it collapsed under its own weight.
Still a good thing, of course, but it would have been nicer to have this stupid idea explicitly faced down.
No, darn it all to heck, this person is not the planet's most moronic hacker He is the planet's most moronic cracker.
Do you actually know any non-geeks? Because the ones I know would not find an eight-word "explanation" using the terms "DNS TTL" and "IP TTL" enormously helpful! :-)
There is a rather better write-up of this awesome story on MNSBC, including some rather shocking pictures. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7285683/
How is this flamebait?
(This should be the official Slashdot motto :-)
I don't think so; at least, I think that's only true if you take an overly literal reading of the cartoon. The point it's making is that you always make a trade-off between the freedom to do Cool Stuff and the intimacy of developed and dependent relationships -- with kids as well as spouses. For a lot of people (me included) it's a trade worth making. I hate it that I can't really go skiing any more, but the rewards of being thoroughly married with three children so totally make up for it that, really, that hardship is lost in the noise. YMMV.
The answer to your question is here: http://www.qwantz.com/index.pl?comic=401
Looks like I was too dmub for my own good.
I hate that. Don't you hate that? When you type in a search keyword, isn't it because you want that keyword to appear in the documents you find?
This "find tangentially related documents" feature will be fine so long as they make it optional and set it to be off by default. Otherwise, I don't want their idea of what pages I should be looking at polluting my results list.
I call "innovation for the sake of innovation".
These "floaters" remind me of that childish thing where someone leaps around thrusting their hands in front of your face going, "Not touching! Can't get mad!" Oh, yeah. That behaviour is really going to make me want to buy your product.
Since "floater" is (in England, anyway) slang for a turd that can't be flushed away, the name is at least appropriate.
Arrrghghghhghg!
You are completely right, of course. Here is the fixed version:
Thanks for spotting my oversight.
Three and a bit years ago, as a satire on the absurd over-enthusiasm for all things XML that was then taking over the world, I invented a parody language, XMC. Guess what? The over-enthusiasm for XML has continued unabated and now has taken over the world. And so life imitates art.
Herewith, a sample XMC program:
Exercises for the reader:
1. What does this do?
2. Is it easier to read than the corresponding C program?