Is there any ethical justification to putting papers behind a paywall? I mean, it's pretty damn fucked up that in this time of unprecedented ability to share information so much is being locked away.
Would you be in favor of doing something like putting in a proviso to at the very least government sourced grants that requires free public access to papers?
Jews.
Seriosly
>government sourced grants
I would just defund those.
I would also not enforce copyright law. Let them have a paywall but if someone else spreads copies, not the government's job to prevent that.
>Let them have a paywall but if someone else spreads copies, not the government's job to prevent that.
scihub isn't dead yet
for da maneh you communist scum
There should be even more cracking teams going after paywall PDFs and releasing them on torrent sites.
>Is there any ethical justification to putting papers behind a paywall?
No. Use sci-hub, never purchase. The authors don't get anything and the supposed value of "'peer review" has long since been corrupted and rendered null. People only use such journals for their visibility and sense of prestige, which is changing quickly.
• guvmint-funded research
• taxpayer dollerz
• behind paywall
• WTF
Meanwhile Elsevier rakes in the billions annually.
>Is there any ethical justification to putting papers behind a paywall?
>Should people be allowed to require payment for the work they do running servers and curating articles?
Obviously not, must be because of the joos.
good goym
All the actual hard work is in the peer review process, and they use expert researchers from across the fields who they do not pay, instead it is deemed a matter of necessity that you use your valuable time in this manner, instead of working on, say, the research projects for which your funding is actually earmarked.
journal paywalls are a fucking scam and i for one am glad that they are coming down
Am I going too far to suggest the people running these journals, in high places, deserve to be in front of a firing squad?
The effects of these behaviors are practically crimes against humanity, especially in the context of medicine.
>Am I going too far to suggest the people running these journals, in high places, deserve to be in front of a firing squad?
Not really.
I really haven seen good arguments why the paywall exist in the first place everyone seems to shrug.
It sucks when your advisor tells you to submit to Elsevier journals because you're too early in your career to be able to take moral stands like that.
>haven't*
It sucks that they're right from most angles.
It's an awful thing and we are subverting it everywhere we can.
Fuck those who stifle science, in order to acquire resources, prestige and dominance like the silly little chimps that they are.
>All the actual hard work is in the peer review process, and they use expert researchers from across the fields who they do not pay, instead it is deemed a matter of necessity that you use your valuable time in this manner, instead of working on, say, the research projects for which your funding is actually earmarked.
If you think it is so unfair, have you considered: Not accessing journals behind a paywall. Oh look, now you're no longer being cheated.
This.
The only way we'll bring them down is by boycotting them.
Reed-Elsevier is one of the largest academic journal publishers in the world, for example this corporation even owns the Lancet.
They directly benefit from the paywall that keeps most individuals from accessing scientific literature, and fund PR campaigns attempting to discredit the Open Access movement, which is campaigning for open access to academic literature in the name of scientific and human development.
Reed-Elsevier also run the DSEI international arms fair in London, where horrendously elaborate weaponry is sold by western arms manufacturers, typically to unstable dictatorships in Africa and The Middle East.
Brb, just gonna kill myself.
Corporations really are ultimately like virulent bacterial infections, or cell clusters very prone to becoming cancers.
They are the means by which the socially dominant structure society around their desires.
This isn't exactly surprising, considering that we are social primates who live in social hierarchies.
I dont understand all the hate for corporations that I see so often. Sure, there are many greedy people in corporations, but any large social organization will have people exploiting it to their benefit.
Corporations like Monsanto, McDonald's, and Wal-Mart have made consumer goods extremely inexpensive due to the efficiency of the supply chain. Those corporations which are most often accused of exploiting poor people are often the best means of supplying those same poor people with very cheap food and household supplies. The quality of life of people in poverty is highly improved if they are close to a fastfood chain or store like walmart.
Ok user, I’m going to need to elaborate on this for you:
The human population of any nation can only consume a certain amount of food, in order to maintain a healthy weight, therefore food corporations are stuck at a rate of growth that matches that of the growth of the population.
In the UK (I’m British) the population's growth rate is currently 0.6% per annum, therefore corporate food suppliers in the UK are stuck at an 0.6% yearly rate of growth.
In order to increase profits, and grow financially, these corporations have two options:
1) Increase the price of their products.
2) Encourage people to eat more.
They pursue both of these avenues with great vigour.
However, the raw materials that go into producing processed foods (glucose-fructose syrup, dextrose, maltodextrin, lactic acid, triglycerides of fatty acids, etc.) are incredibly cheap, due to the subsidisation of grain farming, particularly corn, which is carried out on unprecedented scales due to the use of fossil fuel based pesticides and fertilisers, as well as genetic engineering.
Therefore, although the price difference between raw materials and finished product is significant, and subsequently allows for an excellent profit margin, these products are still relatively cheap, and of course highly accessible.
This results an almost inexhaustible supply of easily affordable yet overpriced - cheaply produced - processed foods, which the public are encouraged to consume evermore of, through elaborate advertising and marketing campaigns, often targeted specifically at children.
And our public leaders wonder why we have an obesity epidemic, while having the audacity to tell people that if they want to lose weight they simply need to exercise more.
Exercise? Try burning off a large Big Mac meal and a giant cookie by jogging and see how it goes.
Here's some insight, it'd likely take you half a day.
Now before anybody pipes up and says 'well, people have a choice whether or not to eat these foods, and they have chosen. It's what the people want!'
People's choices are greatly affected by environmental stimuli, and therefore by advertising.
Advertising works, if it didn't then corporations wouldn't spend hundreds of millions of pounds on it each year.
Combine that with the fact that evolution has primed us to seek foods high in glucose, fructose and various forms of fat, and you realise that the entire notion of choice is largely an illusion.
The corporate food industry is a supply driven industry, and it is the direct cause of the modern obesity epidemic, the majority contributor to environmental pollution and an enormous drain on energy resources, in the form of fossil fuels, which subsequently encourages western military intervention and expansion in the Middle East and other oil rich territories.
>The quality of life of people in poverty is highly improved if they are close to a fastfood chain or store like walmart.
I personally find that diabetes, obesity, cardiovascular disease, environmental pollution, the stifling of local and diversified agricultural markets and oil wars really increase my quality of life, so I’m sure poor people will agree.
There are several ways around this, just get more creative and be happy a paywall is stopping scrubs from gaining access where you're marginally smart enough to be able to.
Well said, user. This is a far larger problem in America where not only people don't care, but also ignore all warnings with "everything kills you". This is pretty funny to hear from the average person here considering that he/she wants to live as long as possible.
Its fucked, but hell if i would be getting paid from it i would support it
I usually use the US as an example, however decided to use my own country as an example this time.
The US is writing the book on this sort of practice for the rest of the world.
It's truly a sorry state of affairs.
Very interesting video on this subject for you op.
That there are ways to get access isn't the point. Hell, there are a lot of people like me who are either at a school or a company who either has paid for access to everything, or getting access just requires putting in a request to someone holding the purse strings or purchasing it with your expense account.
It's a pointless middleman who is taking money away from research without adding any value. I can see why this model worked before current technology, but with current tech, the only reason it continues to exist is just the momentum of tradition combined with no one being assed to fix it.
I mean honestly, all that's required now is having volunteers to do the reviewing (and I think these days, we should actually have professional reviewers, especially since we have fields like research researchers, but that's a different matter), a mechanism to distribute works to the volunteers, to receive their reviews, and then a way to post it.
This wouldn't be free and someone would have to maintain it, but hell, when you consider that some journals cost organizations on the order of 30k-50k/year, I'm pretty sure you could find a grant/donation deal that will happily and easily cover the costs of operating.
You do realize that open-access journal exist, with mixed results?
Not really, it doesn't actually address the problem. No one really gives a shit about efforts of individuals to pirate papers. It's like how Adobe and Microsoft don't give a shit about people pirating Photoshop and Office, respectively. They care about Universities and other organizations pirating, which doesn't really happen because they come after them with a huge hammer. Because of the way things like copyright law work, it doesn't make sense to go after individuals because they don't have large enough amounts of money to make dealing with the legalities worthwhile, and for large organizations, the really high fees that are charged are significantly less than the penalties that they would pay so it just makes sense to pay the fees and not worry about it.
That only matters if there's parity of content, and as mentioned above, you almost always have to already have an established career before you can survive publishing in one instead of one of the paid ones, which continues to ensure that parity will not happen.
This isn't like choosing between GIMP which can do a lot of what Photoshop can, it's a situation where X-paid journal has the only studies on the specific topic you're looking for.
>Exercise? Try burning off a large Big Mac meal and a giant cookie by jogging and see how it goes.
This. Everytime I tell people "calories in vs calories out, gotta work it off" or the "energy balance" philosophy (created by thinktanks and seeded into school nutritional education) is not a useful perspective, they push back, hard. But the fact is, like you said, that isn't how anything works and isn't even metabolically possible. Your body isn't like putting gas in a car.
Yo, OP. You might be interested in this link.
library.maastrichtuniversity.nl
Now, seeing as how england left the EU, the open access movement is screwed on forcing Elsevier to openly publish their journals.
A large portion of the texts in medical fields are published in open access journals. For example, of the 48 million papers published (in total, not just medical), 26 million are hosted by Pubmed. Pubmed is not only free, but they have an open api that allows people to query searches programmatically, be it gene sequencing or searches on papers.
>Now before anybody pipes up and says 'well, people have a choice whether or not to eat these foods, and they have chosen. It's what the people want!'
>be me
>at local grocery store
>scouring through ingredient lists for HFCS-free juice
>find some and buy some
>return 1 week later to buy more
>they don't have it in stock, it has been replaced with HFCS juice instead
>wait another week, still nothing
>ask store manager "Hey, what happened to ____? I loved that stuff."
>Turns out it is still made, just under a different label now, but now has HFCS.
Every year, I grow more food at home and trade home grown foods with more neighbors, family, and friends. For me, this is the only real choice I have in food selection. I'm no longer relying on some random person/people who I have never seen in my life to grow, process, and make the food I eat. I want to be able to look in the mirror or in the eye of the person who grew and/or made the food that I eat.
Somewhat unrelated, but I simply can't trust corporations with my food. Not because of some shady tinfoil hat conspiracy, but because of past legit track records of deceit and bold-faced lying. Lie to me once and you are labeled a liar forever.
Sorry for being so off-topic with the thread subject.
It should be free to anyone, but if a company wants to offer a service fee on their website they can (cross-referencing, searches, etc). They just shouldn't be able to make you pay for the actual papers themselves.
The vast majority of papers indexed by pubmed only include the abstract. The full paper is behind some 29.99 - 36.66 paywall.
They're indexed? Not published? Thank you for correcting me.
Thanks. Also, read up on "supernormal stimulus" and how marketing uses it. Also, stuff like "The Pleasure Trap".
I'm just glad the popsci in me is satisfied with most abstracts and that most average trolls are silenced with a copy-paste of it.
Well, in a way you could say they're both, but pubmed itself is generally an index and at most a mirror. Sometimes the full text is made available on pubmed, and hosted on their site, but there's still a primary publisher it was actually published through.
>not just emailing the researcher and asking for a copy of the paper
>Implying this isn't technically illegal, as the author doesn't own the paper
>Implying that isn't an absurdly complex and involved method of working around something fundamentally broken
Stop. You will give an inch and an inch and an inch, and shrug it off until you feel your heels on the edge of a cliff.
Just shush, and use sci-hub.
Does there exist a site where I can paste a doi and receive raw datasets from that paper?
>Now, seeing as how england left the EU, the open access movement is screwed on forcing Elsevier to openly publish their journals.
The EU could never force a publisher to go open access like that, only to require that EU grants have open access versions of the paper.
The UK already has that and has done for years.
This really isn't a problem in astronomy and some fields of physics where arXiv is the gold standard. You still need to publish to get anywhere but it's convenient and free.
Ran a google search on UK open access. Don't see anything confirming what you've said. Got a link?
>Those corporations which are most often accused of exploiting poor people are often the best means of supplying those same poor people with very cheap food and household supplies.
I know this isn't the thread for it, but I'd like to have a go at the minimum wage as well.
The minimum wage is a terrible thing. Walmart isn't "exploiting" people when paying them minimum wage, walmart is, in fact, the best thing in their lives because fuck-all else is paying them any money.
I keep hearing people say shit like "You should be able to afford to live on the minimum wage" but have you considered: You should be able to afford to live unemployed. If "people have no money" is a problem, the obvious solution is "give them money," which you can e.g. fund with taxes. If you instead pick "force the nearest large corporation to give them money, but only while they're employed at that corporation," you are terrible at solving problems.
You aren't seeing the full picture, user.
The demise of the welfare state after the post-war renegotiation of the economic social contract is directly resultant of the rise of neoliberalism within western political domains, which saw funds redirected from public spending to private sector subsidies, in the form of tax breaks, grants and bonds.
We are essentially living in an age of socialism for the rich and free enterprise for the poor.
Capitalism is dead as the markets are no longer self-regulatory, but rather subject to government intervention and bailouts of the most powerful corporate entities in existence.
We live in a fraudulent economy and an entirely rigged societal system; the revolving door policy operating between politics, big business and the media, effectively renders impartiality and oversight little more than a relic of a not too distant past.
Right or wrong, your analysis has nothing to do with state-enforced minimum wage.
(And I am not the user that the MW post was a response to, so if you have issue with that post, take it up with him.)
what part of
>journal paywalls are a fucking scam and i for one am glad that they are coming down
did you not read
The worst part of gutter trash like that, is on the slim chance anyone else manages to push things towards a better system, they will still benefit from it. Despite being myopic garbage that was in the way, argued with you could not be pushed into motion, and doesn't at all deserve to reap any manner of reward... there they are. Disgusting half baked parasites still sucking off the fruits of your labor.
Sickens me such a deficient thing is able to exist.
Editors and maintainance staff need to be paid.
People do not work for free.
>Disgusting half baked parasites still sucking off the fruits of your labor.
If that annoys you, maybe I could stop doing that and ...
pay you?
OH NO! HOW TERRIBLE! I PROPOSED YOU SHOULD BE ALLOWED TO CHARGE MONEY FOR YOUR LABOR
Truly I am the worst.
>the greatest threat to w.c.
It's not Western civilization. You meant corporativism
where does the money go exactly? no one has been able to give me a straight answer.
No greater vision of the bigger picture. Just a mindless parasite bred to sleepwalk through life, making himself a nuisance to anyone trying to get anything done. Never able to accept that the boat might be worth rocking, until it's far too late. History is littered with you sort. It's the most base issue with our overall dynamic as a species.
Our exchange ends, parasite.
Fedora.jpg
>.jpg
I exclusively use lossless formats. Keep your degenerate lossy encoding to yourself, parasite.
>fastfood
>quality of life
opinion discarded. "fastfood" is literally poison designed to be as addictive, cheap to manufacture and as high in calories as possible.
I think having kids eat at mc donalds/other fastfood chains more than once a month should be considered child abuse.
But user, you just described most processed food...
>Paying for things you use instead of just assuming they should be mine for free
>Parasitism
I'm sure you'll learn how language works some day
>I think having kids eat at mc donalds/other fastfood chains more than once a month should be considered child abuse.
What have you done to provide alternatives?
'no'
>I think letting children smoke crack is child abuse
>WELL I DONT SEE YOU SUGGESTING ANY ALTERNATIVES
if your argument is that poor people cant afford decenct, non-processed food, I tend to agree.
obesity is largely a problem of low-income families.
middle- and upper-class eats healthier (and therefore more expensive).
I think similarly about most processed "food", yes
>if your argument is that poor people cant afford decenct, non-processed food, I tend to agree.
Mostly that.
Also that any law that bans McDonalds food for children will be enforced by the same police that keeps shooting people.
>"fastfood" is literally poison
Since you don't even know the meaning if the word "literally", it's hard to take your "opinion discarded" comment seriously.
And do you really believe it's designed to be "as high in calories as possible"?
You're an idiot.
>if your argument is that poor people cant afford decenct, non-processed food, I tend to agree.
Depending on region, this is a myth.
Here's a link to my diet, nearly in full:
I eat better than practically anyone, and I also spend significantly less. Fast food is absolutely not cheap. Nor is most processed food, those prices are engineered to maximize profits, and the waters are well tested to see what people can and will pay over time.
There are two main problems:
-"Natural food stores" set up in richer areas and markup their goods 300+%. I live in Vermont, and this is the case even here. I go to Burlington and something that's ~6$ in Montpelier is 8.50 - 9.30 in Burlington. Something 1.50 is 2.50. Something 3.00 is 6.00, etc. This might be the only outlet for organic or decent quality foods, and it gives a rightfully bad impression.
-Inner cities don't have access to much of any produce half the time. Processed food is the best ya get.
Poor people's main deficit is time. They don't have time to prepare shit, and good processed food is not available (despite existing on the market). Also, lower education, and again, lower time and higher stress, cripples learning about content of food and overall nutrition. No time. You're tired before you've even begun.
These problems could be easily fixed, if it weren't for the follower and the parasite. And the overall disjointed and poor capacity for information exchange and organization within the human species, as well as the tendency towards hierarchical control structures. Par for the course. If times are a changin', you're on top, you can delay it until you've realigned to stay there if you didn't see it coming. New way to be the same old thing.
>as high in calories as possible
this one isnt actually true, I agree, it's just often coincides with the (true) aim of achieving maximum addictiveness
in fact, take any food without HFCS, now add HFCS to it.
It is now 10x as addictive (and probably has at least 2x the calories compared to before).
so yes, they dont always aim for high calories, it's just a natural side-effect of their aim of maximizing profits (which demands that food should be as addictive as it possibly can)
>You're an idiot.
I love you too. Also enjoy your soda and big mac
>If "people have no money" is a problem, the obvious solution is "give them money," which you can e.g. fund with taxes. If you instead pick "force the nearest large corporation to give them money, but only while they're employed at that corporation," you are terrible at solving problems.
>the rise of neoliberalism within western political domains, which saw funds redirected from public spending to private sector subsidies, in the form of tax breaks, grants and bonds (corporatism).
Where do you think the tax payers' money is going?
Think about it a little harder, user.
Try living in NZ mate
Give blacks free money, let them not have a job and they will still become fat
It's just how animals are
Where does what money go? What's paid to access the papers? Same place the money you pay to access some porn site goes: to turn a profit for the site's owner(s).
Also, what the actual fuck is up with you faggots hijacking a decent topic with your retarded assed diet stuff?
Calm down.
We're on the internet guy, cursing doesn't indicate that someone's upset.