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The paper mentioned in the article, Killing with kindness: Does widespread generalised provisioning of wildlife help or hinder biodiversity conservation efforts

The paper mentioned in the article, Killing with kindness: Does widespread generalised provisioning of wildlife help or hinder biodiversity conservation efforts?, can be found here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0006320721003475?via%3Dihub https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00063...

lucb1e 5y ago
> can be found here For the low price of only $35.95! Not even sure it contains much. The abstract says (replacing some needlessly obscure words because not everyone's native language is english): > Direct effects upon [fed animals] have garnered most research interest, and are generally positive in leading to increased survival, productivity and hence population growth. However, we argue that the wider implications for [their non-fed] competitors, prey and predators are underappreciated and have the potential to generate pervasive negative impacts for biodiversity. "We argue"? Not like, "we show" or "our data shows"? A bit further into it: > Using a case study of UK garden bird food and nestbox provisioning, we hypothesise how well-intentioned [feeding] could be contributing to widespread ecological community change and homogenisation. I know the word hypothesise as basically meaning speculate or a theory yet to be investigated (and a dictionary agrees). I guess they do have some results from that case study, but with this tentative wording I'm not sure it's worth forking over thirty bucks to a publisher for no conclusions.
- mattkrause 5y ago
  FWIW, virtually nobody pays the sticker price for a single article. Many researchers have some kind of institutional access (e.g., through a library). If you don’t, shoot one of the authors an email and ask for a copy. Not only will they certainly send you one—-they don’t see a penny of that money—-but you’ll also make some harried grad student’s day.
  - OJFord 5y ago
    Also assuming you went to university you probably have such access via its library as an alumnus/a, though not (at least in my case) remotely, would have to actually go in and access from the network. (I've never done so; I don't expect many people do, but especially living in the same city still I quite like the idea that in theory I can!)
  - watwut 5y ago
    Does not make the price not absurd. And then you have researchers who have to ask friend of friend or otherwise hunt down articles. These prices is how rich institutions gets even more advantage over those in less rich parts of world. And that is pretty much it.
    - mattkrause 5y ago
      The institution doesn't get that money: literally not a single dime of it goes to the authors, their departments, or their institutions. It goes to publishers. You don't need to be friends-of-friends either. Search for the authors and if the PDF is not on their webpages, shoot one of them an email. All it has to say is "I'm interested in your paper [title], but don't have access to [journal]. Could you send me a reprint/preprint? Thanks." It makes my day when people do this. Getting a paper published is a huge slog with overwhelmingly negative feedback, so it feels great to know that someone actually cares about what you wrote.
      - lucb1e 5y ago
        > It makes my day when people do this. Getting a paper published is a huge slog with overwhelmingly negative feedback, so it feels great to know that someone actually cares about what you wrote. Wait, I don't get this. Probably this is very dumb, pardon my nonacademianess. My first thought is: then why don't you just host it on your own website? Then you can see exactly how many people download it. Heck, it could even be in an accessible HTML format (I'd love this instead of basically-image formats like PDF) and you can check if people leave the page after 5 seconds or if there are 30 minutes worth of mouse movement events. Not to say that you need to track this all identifiably, but the server could ingest "user still active on page" events and aggregate that per IP address or something until the session goes cold, then convert it to a mere "visitor #9001, stayed 27 minutes". I'm probably already overthinking this because I've never seen anyone host their own paper in the first place, nor any other format than PDF. Why doesn't anyone do that? Sending an email to request the paper is much slower than just having access (be that through sci-hub, a friend that you can see is online and whose university still supports the publisher system, etc.), so I don't think that's a good solution even if I understand perfectly why you love to hear of your readers. Imagine you had to email the authors of every link here on HN every time you think a headline sounds interesting; it's just not a solution to paywalls with ridiculous costs per article.

lucb1e 5y ago

> can be found here For the low price of only $35.95! Not even sure it contains much. The abstract says (replacing some needlessly obscure words because not everyone's native language is english): > Direct effects upon [fed animals] have garnered most research interest, and are generally positive in leading to increased survival, productivity and hence population growth. However, we argue that the wider implications for [their non-fed] competitors, prey and predators are underappreciated and have the potential to generate pervasive negative impacts for biodiversity. "We argue"? Not like, "we show" or "our data shows"? A bit further into it: > Using a case study of UK garden bird food and nestbox provisioning, we hypothesise how well-intentioned [feeding] could be contributing to widespread ecological community change and homogenisation. I know the word hypothesise as basically meaning speculate or a theory yet to be investigated (and a dictionary agrees). I guess they do have some results from that case study, but with this tentative wording I'm not sure it's worth forking over thirty bucks to a publisher for no conclusions.

mattkrause 5y ago
FWIW, virtually nobody pays the sticker price for a single article. Many researchers have some kind of institutional access (e.g., through a library). If you don’t, shoot one of the authors an email and ask for a copy. Not only will they certainly send you one—-they don’t see a penny of that money—-but you’ll also make some harried grad student’s day.
- OJFord 5y ago
  Also assuming you went to university you probably have such access via its library as an alumnus/a, though not (at least in my case) remotely, would have to actually go in and access from the network. (I've never done so; I don't expect many people do, but especially living in the same city still I quite like the idea that in theory I can!)
- watwut 5y ago
  Does not make the price not absurd. And then you have researchers who have to ask friend of friend or otherwise hunt down articles. These prices is how rich institutions gets even more advantage over those in less rich parts of world. And that is pretty much it.
  - mattkrause 5y ago
    The institution doesn't get that money: literally not a single dime of it goes to the authors, their departments, or their institutions. It goes to publishers. You don't need to be friends-of-friends either. Search for the authors and if the PDF is not on their webpages, shoot one of them an email. All it has to say is "I'm interested in your paper [title], but don't have access to [journal]. Could you send me a reprint/preprint? Thanks." It makes my day when people do this. Getting a paper published is a huge slog with overwhelmingly negative feedback, so it feels great to know that someone actually cares about what you wrote.
    - lucb1e 5y ago
      > It makes my day when people do this. Getting a paper published is a huge slog with overwhelmingly negative feedback, so it feels great to know that someone actually cares about what you wrote. Wait, I don't get this. Probably this is very dumb, pardon my nonacademianess. My first thought is: then why don't you just host it on your own website? Then you can see exactly how many people download it. Heck, it could even be in an accessible HTML format (I'd love this instead of basically-image formats like PDF) and you can check if people leave the page after 5 seconds or if there are 30 minutes worth of mouse movement events. Not to say that you need to track this all identifiably, but the server could ingest "user still active on page" events and aggregate that per IP address or something until the session goes cold, then convert it to a mere "visitor #9001, stayed 27 minutes". I'm probably already overthinking this because I've never seen anyone host their own paper in the first place, nor any other format than PDF. Why doesn't anyone do that? Sending an email to request the paper is much slower than just having access (be that through sci-hub, a friend that you can see is online and whose university still supports the publisher system, etc.), so I don't think that's a good solution even if I understand perfectly why you love to hear of your readers. Imagine you had to email the authors of every link here on HN every time you think a headline sounds interesting; it's just not a solution to paywalls with ridiculous costs per article.