Paying for scientific papers

Discussion in 'General Science & Technology' started by Luperci, Feb 1, 2008.

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  1. Asguard Kiss my dark side Valued Senior Member

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    Did you even READ what i wrote. you already said you have access because your at uni, i am talking about the general public. If they want to look up a treatment for efficasy they can here, curtasy of the federal goverment. This is the same for most countries with the noticable exception of the US. I have to wonder WHY the US wouldnt want there citizans to see that kind of detailed resurch?
     
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  3. draqon Banned Banned

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    The whole EU has access to this information? It seems to me otherwise.

    As for USA, it has better journals for their own citizens. Those who are interested are already having more information than they need, and the general public in USA could care less...their main food will remain McDonalds.
     
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  5. Asguard Kiss my dark side Valued Senior Member

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    your joking right? The AMJ is better than chocraine resurch? You do realise what the difference is dont you? Chocraine is META-resurch
     
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  7. draqon Banned Banned

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    I am talking avout "Science" "Nature" journals and many more...I get free AIAA journals....I can get free http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/ ... all of anything you can think of I get them free.

    The general public of USA could care less for any science information.
     
  8. Asguard Kiss my dark side Valued Senior Member

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    again they are all first line resurch not meta resurch
     
  9. draqon Banned Banned

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    what is this meta research you speak of? I do not understand the term.
     
  10. Asguard Kiss my dark side Valued Senior Member

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    my apologies, i thought you would have come across the term at uni.

    say your doing your PHD and you do your resurch as a doubble blind randomised controled trial of say 1000 people and you publish it

    It goes in say the BMJ

    Now cochrain would take your resurch (if they found it riguress enough, has to be double blind) and the resurch from 10 other people all who have done resurch on the same thing around the world and they put those studies together and they get THERE results from all these trials. So say your study found that asprin caused heart atacks in 20% of your population, and the 100 other studies all found NO risk then they would conclude that something else was going on in your study because it doesnt match the other studies. THATS meta resurch.
     
  11. draqon Banned Banned

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    oh well than I do get this meta research you speak of. I can't tell you the name of it thou. Anyways why would general public in USA need it? they don't do research...
     
  12. Asguard Kiss my dark side Valued Senior Member

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    Say your doctor perscribes you a drug and the news says that a journal artical is saying it causes such and such. If you were worried you could look it up on cochran and SEE wether its an isolated statistcal error or if it is a serious risk. Yes it requires people to get off there asses and do the checking but its there if people want it. THATS why the goverment pays for it
     
  13. draqon Banned Banned

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    http://scholar.google.com/

    ...once again US public does not care for such.

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  14. Asguard Kiss my dark side Valued Senior Member

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    never herd of that before, and who is to say how much of the public dont care? The point is its an option for those who want it along with journlists, people doing private rescurch, universities, schools, doctors, anyone. Rather than the UNI's paying for it indervidually the goverment decided it was better to just pay for the whole countrie

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  15. draqon Banned Banned

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    what they didn't teach you that in Europe?

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  16. oreodont I am God Registered Senior Member

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    Many paleontology papers are now published on line. The cost of physical publication was more and more prohibitive for such a small number of journal purchasers. If done wisely on-line publishing will be a boon to science but if the line gets 'fudged' between accepted papers and other writings, then the bricks building the foundation for scientific methodology may collapse. 'Science' will mean something different than it does today...more seat of the pants. This isn't necessarily a 'bad' thing as science disciplines are getting more and more hamstrung by the intertia of wading through all the literature that has passed before. It might be actually be liberating for creative thinking.
     
  17. draqon Banned Banned

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    we should invest in hacking more, that way any information online will be free. Torrent the scientific journals, all of them. =p
     
  18. Asguard Kiss my dark side Valued Senior Member

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    um im not IN Europe, why do you keep assuming that?

    Im an Australian and im IN Australia
     
  19. draqon Banned Banned

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    I don't know, you seem to have that "I know everything in this universe" attitude that Europeans have and than their Beagle 24 crashes on Mars with all other Beagles'
     
  20. Nasor Valued Senior Member

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    Any research that the government pays for - which in the U.S. is probably 95%+ of what gets published in science journals - should be free for everyone. My tax money directly paid for it, I should get to read it.
     
  21. D H Some other guy Valued Senior Member

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    First, your going-in position is wrong. Governments fund a small portion of the research performed in the advanced world.

    That said, go to a library.

    Your tax money does not pay for the publication of the journals, nor for the web sites the publishers maintain for on-line access to journal articles, nor for a lot of things involved in the road from research to publication. The government paid for the research. The papers are often a side offshoot of the work for which the government paid. Nonetheless, libraries available to the public do carry scientific journals, either in print or in electronic form.

    The responsibility of the government is not to make sure that Joe Blow has access to the scientific work bought and paid for with Joe's tax money. After all, much of Joe's taxes pay for things from which he will never a direct benefit. Joe still benefits indirectly, and these indirect benefits can vastly exceed the taxes Joe paid.

    The responsibility of the government is to make their best effort in seeing that the scientific research bought and paid for by the government results in the greatest benefits to the people who paid for that research. Spending extra funds to make sure that Joe Blow has full, direct, and free access to that work is counterproductive. Private companies can do this kind of thing much more efficiently and cheaply than can any government.

    Suppose the government did do the work currently done by publishing companies so that you could get the articles free on the net. How much more in taxes do you think you would have to pay to make this possible?
     
  22. Nasor Valued Senior Member

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    You'll note that I said 95% of what gets published in science journals. Corporations with their own labs do a lot of research, yes, but most of that is never published in journals. The vast majority of the research that goes into journals is funded by the government in some manner or other. Open any science journal and try to find a paper that isn't by either a university or a national lab. You might be able to find one, but it will take you a while.
    Very few public libraries have access to science journals. You would need to go to a large, well-funded university library; good luck if you don't happen to live near one. And even if you are at a large university library, you still won't be able to get all the journals. Since journal subsciptions are $1000+/year, no library can afford to carry all of them.
    What cost? The cost of maintaing a web page that serves up pdf files? The "cost of publishing" is very close to zero. As for your bit about "a lot of things involved in the road from research to publication," what exactly are you talking about? The scientist authors write, make graphics, and format the articles for free. Other scientists peer-review and edit them for free. The publisher does virtually nothering, other than sitting in the middle and making a huge amount of money from other people's work.
    Forget about your hypothetical Joe Blow. What about making sure ther government researchers in the same field can get access to the results?
    "More efficiently and cheaply"? Your faith in the efficiency of the free market is heart-warming, but I’m afraid it’s badly out of touch with reality. A one-year online subscription to the Journal of the American Chemical Society is $3165. For the Journal of Algebra, it's $10100. Yes, over ten thousand dollars! The Journal of Theoretical and Mathamatical Physics? $3200. I somehow suspect that the government could set up a web page that serves pdfs for a little bit less than that. This is a classic example of what economists call market failure.
    As I said, the cost of publishing journals is close to zero because journal companies don't really do anything - all the work is done by the scientists for free. Also, the governmnet would no longer have to pay for thousands of individual labs and university libraries to each buy subscriptions to their relevant journals so that they can read about the work that other government-sponsored scientists did.
     
  23. D H Some other guy Valued Senior Member

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    Prove it. I just leafed through a couple of my journals, IEEE Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence and IEEE Transactions on Man, Systems, and Cybernetics. It's not anywhere near 95%. Sponsors of published works include industry (the biggest sponsor by my unscientific survey), various national-level agencies of various countries (Hint: The US is not the only advanced nation on the planet), and even state agencies.

    For the sake of argument I will assume that your preposterous 95% figure is correct.

    Wrong. You need people who decide what is worthy of publishing and what is not, people who edit the articles, people who make all the articles have the same look-and-feel, people who collate the articles, people who maintain the websites, ... Need I go on? Keeping people on-staff is a very, very expensive proposition. Salary is just the start. Benefits. Work space. Equipment. In the eyes of an employer, an employee's salary represents less than 1/2 of the cost of said employee. The employer needs to make enough to cover salary plus all those other things before they even start to turn a profit.

    Let's assume we switched over to your idealized version of how things should work. What a mess. Suppose you are a researcher in, say pattern analysis. Do you know how many government agencies world-wide support research in this field? Without journals, you will have to go to each and every agency to find work in your field. Go to JPL and will see papers on spacecraft guidance intermingled with papers on entering the atmosphere of Mars before you find the one paper you want on using pattern analysis on Mar. Go to the Army and you will see even more papers that have nothing to do with your field before you find a few on pattern analysis. Why should any one government agency collate all the papers on pattern analysis? Why should they go beyond their bounds, and how could they go beyond their bounds, say to Italy or California, to get their work on pattern analysis?

    The ideal world you want is an ideal nightmare. The world we have isn't perfect, but that's life. To quote Voltaire, "The perfect is the enemy of the good."
     
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