7 ms·

> It would be easier to embrace academia if academic research, much of which is paid for with public funds, was published in open journals that all taxpayers co

by timtadh 15y ago

> It would be easier to embrace academia if academic research, much of which is paid for with public funds, was published in open journals that all taxpayers could read for free, instead of in expensive private journals that only other academics can access for "free" via their university libraries. In principle I agree with this point, in practice it is moot. Any member of the public can visit a local university or large public library and get access to any book or journal article they desire. No, they can't read the articles without leaving their office, but, yes, they can get all of the research articles and other scholarly publications for free. Libraries exist for a reason, they still provide the service they advertise. This is a false criticism of the flawed and broken publishing system. > I think this essay's definition of anti-intellectualism is incoherent -- must I disrespect knowledge itself, disrespect all education beyond grade school, disrespect War and Peace, or merely disrespect Nicholas Carr, in order to be labeled an anti-intellectual? -- so it's hard to make a definitive response. As in a discussion on religion it depends entirely on how you scope the word "intellectual." It could and does mean a variety of things. I believe the author of the original article was leaving it open to many meanings. This is not good writing. He should have said what he meant, instead of the feeling of what he meant. > in a world where it didn't involve an enormous pay cut, enormous career risk, incredible devotion, high stress, difficult politics, and potentially the sacrifice of one's family life. Those are all fair statements on the cost of pursuing a life in academic research. However, only the pay cut really differentiates academia from any other competitive field. People engage in academia because they love it not because they get rich. > As economies grow around the world and the web gets built out, we add more and more people to our public discourse Interesting factoid, the amount of academic publishing has pretty much only gone up in last century. So even discounting the Internet public discourse (and I do believe academic publications are public) has been growing.

mechanical_fish 15y ago
Let's not get into estimating the actual percentage of humanity that lives within, say, thirty minutes of a publicly accessible library with a Nature subscription. (I do, but I pay big-city rent for a reason.) Instead, let's talk about modern information technology. Have you ever visited tvtropes.org? Don't go if you don't have the rest of the day to waste. It is seriously addictive, mostly because it's a sterling example of hypertext in action, maybe even better than Wikipedia. Every article is linked to the others. Every citation has a link. You want to check a reference, you click. You want to surf a chain of references N generations back, you click N times. You can't not follow the links on tvtropes.org, unless you simply hate all pop culture. It is the height of irony that HTTP was originally invented to link up academic publications, because when last I surfed academic journals, six years or so ago, it didn't work that way. You would click a journal article, maybe click through a couple of crappy login screens, maybe navigate up and down some menus on some journal's CMS, and finally find the article after a bunch of surfing. It would have footnotes. The footnotes were almost never links. Instead you had to manually type their key information into your local library's website in some other window, and then hope that your local library had the journal, then surf through some more screens and up and down some more delightful CMS cruft before you found the article. Smart folks would download PDFs of everything as they went and then file them in some personal database like Endnote. But they still wouldn't be cross-linked. You had to spend time organizing them, or use the search a lot. I assume that this workflow has improved at least a bit since then. Maybe Endnote or its competitor is smarter, maybe journals have finally started publishing hyperlinks. Maybe it has even improved to the point that academic literature is half as easy to surf as, say, tvtropes.org. In which case I take back much of what I said, and we can go back to estimating how many people can actually be expected to access the blessed terminal where all of this can happen. But I bet it hasn't improved that much. I bet it's still impossible to construct a hyperlink from Nature directly to Science, mostly because they've got different and incompatible DRM. Mind you, things are heaven compared to when I was in grad school, when following references from a paper meant going into the stacks, laboriously collecting one heavy paper volume per footnote, physically hauling them back to a photocopier, and copying the articles two pages at a time. Oh, the hours I spent. Life is much better now. But, you know, young people don't know or care about how hard I had it. All they can see is that it's fifty times easier to research the plot of any episode of Neon Genesis Evangelion than it is to follow a chain of citations from a Nobel-winning publication back two generations, and that a popular article about a videogame from 1980 can link to its sources but a popular article about a publication from last Wednesday's Nature can only link to a paywall. Science is always going to be a hard sell compared to the rest of our culture, so why do we make it even harder?
- pjscott 15y ago
  There has been some improvement: namely, if you copy and paste an article's title from the bibliography into Google Scholar, you can usually get to a PDF without clicking through much CMS cruft. That's about it, though.
  - danvet 15y ago
    Assuming your sitting in front of a terminal that has the subscription. I'm still loathing my university's vpn solution for being soooo dog-slow, but it was the only way to read intersting papers from home or gather all the references for a bit of research. Now that I'm out of my studies I'm totally deprived of that pleasure. Yeah, you could go to the library. Hell will freeze over when I do that just to scroll over an interesting paper on a slow day. And the most infuriating thing: I'm already paying for most of the public research with my taxes.
- timtadh 15y ago
  > Maybe it has even improved to the point that academic literature is half as easy to surf as, say, tvtropes.org. It is. try google scholar, pub med, or academic.research.microsoft.com for starters and Mendeley for building a personal "library" (note Mendeley isn't perfect but it is a lot better than not using a paper manager.) Things aren't great but they are better. > I bet it's still impossible to construct a hyperlink from Nature directly to Science, mostly because they've got different and incompatible DRM. I have no idea I don't read Nature or Science. The Computer Science literature I read is all easily searchable these days. > Mind you, things are heaven compared to when I was in grad school, when following references from a paper meant going into the stacks, laboriously collecting one heavy paper volume per footnote, physically hauling them back to a photocopier, and copying the articles two pages at a time. I still do this (but for Religious Studies research in my spare time) and don't really mind it, although I try to avoid photocopying when possible as it is a pain. > All they can see is that it's fifty times easier to research the plot of any episode of Neon Genesis Evangelion than it is to follow a chain of citations from a Nobel-winning publication back two generations, and that a popular article about a videogame from 1980 can link to its sources but a popular article about a publication from last Wednesday's Nature can only link to a paywall. I am usually against the idea of progress, but in this instance I do believe this will not be the case forever. Already we are starting to see changes in the publishing industry. Search tools are improving, archiving tool are improving, library collection tools are improving. Yes it is slow, but the problems they are solving a much harder than the problem of generating new content. New content can be put the days leading format (papyrus, scrolls, codex, books, pamphlets/newspaper/magazine, websites/blogs/wikis) at zero extra cost. Old content however costs a lot to update. Libraries and academic journals have a lot of content that existed before the web, before the pdf, and before the wiki. It takes sometime of the format transition but if the past is any guide the old formats eventually become historical curiosities rather than knowledge repositories.
Fargren 15y ago
Any member of the public can visit a local university or large public library and get access to any book or journal article they desire. I think it's a bit sad that I have to drive all the way from Buenos Aires to Texas if I want to read a journal from an university in the US, even if it wasn't my tax money that paid for it. Specially considering how positive and easy it would be to make this knowledge publicly available.
- juiceandjuice 15y ago
  There's often creative ways around this. For one, emailing the authors of an article and asking for a copy, checking arxiv, emailing a journal and asking for a copy (yes, sometimes they will give you a copy for free) and a bunch of other things. When I was doing more research I did this occasionally and it worked out good, especially for newer papers.
  - wisty 15y ago
    The original point still stands - it's 50 times easier to click on a wikipedia link. At least.
    - juiceandjuice 15y ago
      It's easier to take a shit on a sidewalk when you are outside instead of using a toilet too.
      - noonespecial 15y ago
        Except in this case, thanks to DRM, obfuscation, "secret-club-ism" and some generally really ugly examples of rent-seeking, you're the sidewalk.
      - juiceandjuice 15y ago
        Note to self: Stop posting on websites drunk
    - deleted 15y ago
premchai21 15y ago
> Any member of the public can visit a local university or large public library and get access to any book or journal article they desire. This has not been entirely my experience. Unfortunately, I only have a half-remembered anecdote rather than data, but what I've found is that journals in some university libraries are becoming less accessible in paper form. Instead, one is directed to a JSTOR subscription or such. Of course, in order to access the electronic version, one must authenticate to the network with a university ID. This erodes the effect you describe. Can anyone else confirm or refute this trend? Am I merely imagining it?
PaulHoule 15y ago
At Cornell anybody can walk into the library and find books in the stacks. Go to Harvard or Yale and you'll find armed guards in their way. Cornell's libraries are gradually disappearing; they quit buying CS conference proceedings in 2008 and 95% of the books in physical sciences and engineering will be going into long term storage where you can only get them with a library card. Recent literature will only be available by using a computer connected to the internal internet of the school, and there may be a time when all of those computers are behind a locked door and need a password. As for "people engage in academia because they love it" I've seen at elite schools that 80%+ of the researchers are people whose parents were also researchers who started drilling into them with a young age that their life would be complete failures if they did anything else. Often they'd run so ragged publishing and perishing that it's hard to believe that they enjoy anything at all.
dagw 15y ago
Any member of the public can visit a local university or large public library and get access to any book or journal article they desire. At my local university library the online journal databases are only available to students and faculty. Members of the public can only read the paper journals.

by timtadh 15y ago

mechanical_fish 15y ago

Let's not get into estimating the actual percentage of humanity that lives within, say, thirty minutes of a publicly accessible library with a Nature subscription. (I do, but I pay big-city rent for a reason.) Instead, let's talk about modern information technology. Have you ever visited tvtropes.org? Don't go if you don't have the rest of the day to waste. It is seriously addictive, mostly because it's a sterling example of hypertext in action, maybe even better than Wikipedia. Every article is linked to the others. Every citation has a link. You want to check a reference, you click. You want to surf a chain of references N generations back, you click N times. You can't not follow the links on tvtropes.org, unless you simply hate all pop culture. It is the height of irony that HTTP was originally invented to link up academic publications, because when last I surfed academic journals, six years or so ago, it didn't work that way. You would click a journal article, maybe click through a couple of crappy login screens, maybe navigate up and down some menus on some journal's CMS, and finally find the article after a bunch of surfing. It would have footnotes. The footnotes were almost never links. Instead you had to manually type their key information into your local library's website in some other window, and then hope that your local library had the journal, then surf through some more screens and up and down some more delightful CMS cruft before you found the article. Smart folks would download PDFs of everything as they went and then file them in some personal database like Endnote. But they still wouldn't be cross-linked. You had to spend time organizing them, or use the search a lot. I assume that this workflow has improved at least a bit since then. Maybe Endnote or its competitor is smarter, maybe journals have finally started publishing hyperlinks. Maybe it has even improved to the point that academic literature is half as easy to surf as, say, tvtropes.org. In which case I take back much of what I said, and we can go back to estimating how many people can actually be expected to access the blessed terminal where all of this can happen. But I bet it hasn't improved that much. I bet it's still impossible to construct a hyperlink from Nature directly to Science, mostly because they've got different and incompatible DRM. Mind you, things are heaven compared to when I was in grad school, when following references from a paper meant going into the stacks, laboriously collecting one heavy paper volume per footnote, physically hauling them back to a photocopier, and copying the articles two pages at a time. Oh, the hours I spent. Life is much better now. But, you know, young people don't know or care about how hard I had it. All they can see is that it's fifty times easier to research the plot of any episode of Neon Genesis Evangelion than it is to follow a chain of citations from a Nobel-winning publication back two generations, and that a popular article about a videogame from 1980 can link to its sources but a popular article about a publication from last Wednesday's Nature can only link to a paywall. Science is always going to be a hard sell compared to the rest of our culture, so why do we make it even harder?

pjscott 15y ago
There has been some improvement: namely, if you copy and paste an article's title from the bibliography into Google Scholar, you can usually get to a PDF without clicking through much CMS cruft. That's about it, though.
- danvet 15y ago
  Assuming your sitting in front of a terminal that has the subscription. I'm still loathing my university's vpn solution for being soooo dog-slow, but it was the only way to read intersting papers from home or gather all the references for a bit of research. Now that I'm out of my studies I'm totally deprived of that pleasure. Yeah, you could go to the library. Hell will freeze over when I do that just to scroll over an interesting paper on a slow day. And the most infuriating thing: I'm already paying for most of the public research with my taxes.
timtadh 15y ago
> Maybe it has even improved to the point that academic literature is half as easy to surf as, say, tvtropes.org. It is. try google scholar, pub med, or academic.research.microsoft.com for starters and Mendeley for building a personal "library" (note Mendeley isn't perfect but it is a lot better than not using a paper manager.) Things aren't great but they are better. > I bet it's still impossible to construct a hyperlink from Nature directly to Science, mostly because they've got different and incompatible DRM. I have no idea I don't read Nature or Science. The Computer Science literature I read is all easily searchable these days. > Mind you, things are heaven compared to when I was in grad school, when following references from a paper meant going into the stacks, laboriously collecting one heavy paper volume per footnote, physically hauling them back to a photocopier, and copying the articles two pages at a time. I still do this (but for Religious Studies research in my spare time) and don't really mind it, although I try to avoid photocopying when possible as it is a pain. > All they can see is that it's fifty times easier to research the plot of any episode of Neon Genesis Evangelion than it is to follow a chain of citations from a Nobel-winning publication back two generations, and that a popular article about a videogame from 1980 can link to its sources but a popular article about a publication from last Wednesday's Nature can only link to a paywall. I am usually against the idea of progress, but in this instance I do believe this will not be the case forever. Already we are starting to see changes in the publishing industry. Search tools are improving, archiving tool are improving, library collection tools are improving. Yes it is slow, but the problems they are solving a much harder than the problem of generating new content. New content can be put the days leading format (papyrus, scrolls, codex, books, pamphlets/newspaper/magazine, websites/blogs/wikis) at zero extra cost. Old content however costs a lot to update. Libraries and academic journals have a lot of content that existed before the web, before the pdf, and before the wiki. It takes sometime of the format transition but if the past is any guide the old formats eventually become historical curiosities rather than knowledge repositories.

Fargren 15y ago

Any member of the public can visit a local university or large public library and get access to any book or journal article they desire. I think it's a bit sad that I have to drive all the way from Buenos Aires to Texas if I want to read a journal from an university in the US, even if it wasn't my tax money that paid for it. Specially considering how positive and easy it would be to make this knowledge publicly available.

juiceandjuice 15y ago
There's often creative ways around this. For one, emailing the authors of an article and asking for a copy, checking arxiv, emailing a journal and asking for a copy (yes, sometimes they will give you a copy for free) and a bunch of other things. When I was doing more research I did this occasionally and it worked out good, especially for newer papers.
- wisty 15y ago
  The original point still stands - it's 50 times easier to click on a wikipedia link. At least.
  - juiceandjuice 15y ago
    It's easier to take a shit on a sidewalk when you are outside instead of using a toilet too.
    - noonespecial 15y ago
      Except in this case, thanks to DRM, obfuscation, "secret-club-ism" and some generally really ugly examples of rent-seeking, you're the sidewalk.
    - juiceandjuice 15y ago
      Note to self: Stop posting on websites drunk
  - deleted 15y ago

premchai21 15y ago

> Any member of the public can visit a local university or large public library and get access to any book or journal article they desire. This has not been entirely my experience. Unfortunately, I only have a half-remembered anecdote rather than data, but what I've found is that journals in some university libraries are becoming less accessible in paper form. Instead, one is directed to a JSTOR subscription or such. Of course, in order to access the electronic version, one must authenticate to the network with a university ID. This erodes the effect you describe. Can anyone else confirm or refute this trend? Am I merely imagining it?

PaulHoule 15y ago

At Cornell anybody can walk into the library and find books in the stacks. Go to Harvard or Yale and you'll find armed guards in their way. Cornell's libraries are gradually disappearing; they quit buying CS conference proceedings in 2008 and 95% of the books in physical sciences and engineering will be going into long term storage where you can only get them with a library card. Recent literature will only be available by using a computer connected to the internal internet of the school, and there may be a time when all of those computers are behind a locked door and need a password. As for "people engage in academia because they love it" I've seen at elite schools that 80%+ of the researchers are people whose parents were also researchers who started drilling into them with a young age that their life would be complete failures if they did anything else. Often they'd run so ragged publishing and perishing that it's hard to believe that they enjoy anything at all.

dagw 15y ago

Any member of the public can visit a local university or large public library and get access to any book or journal article they desire. At my local university library the online journal databases are only available to students and faculty. Members of the public can only read the paper journals.