This is a very good article, but in reference to what I was saying the other day... http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=304624 http://news.ycombinator.com/item

This is a very good article, but in reference to what I was saying the other day... http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=304624 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=304624 ... this is still not science. This article is just metascience. I'm still cut off from the real scientific literature. I can't see their original figures. I don't know how they pinpointed individual neurons with their probes. I don't know the estimated error of their technique. I don't know whether their sample seems to be large enough, or if there's an obvious bias in it. I can't read their caveats. I can't find out how this relates to the work of their peers, because I can't look up their chain of references. To fix this I have to pay Science $10 for the right to read their article for one day (presumably the unspoken assumption is that I will print it out), or $150 for a year of Science browsing rights. Of course, that only buys me access to Science, and it's likely that many of this paper's significant references -- including, most importantly, the earlier and more detailed publications by the same authors -- are not Science papers, so they'll cost me extra. At least MIT hasn't locked their libraries yet, so if I had the time I could go down to Cambridge and read a bunch of articles from MIT's terminals. Not sure I can print them, though, let alone file them electronically for future reference. All hail PLoS!