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Journals and Electronic Access
Feb. 10th, 2005 05:37 pmThe more I think about it the more angry I get that the academic journals of the world aren't available online for everyone forever for free. I'm reviewing a paper for Andrzej, and it's taking a lot of work - for which I'm not paid. Nor is Andrzej. As a matter of fact, nobody is paid except the publisher who also requires you to sign over the copyright. And journal prices are increasing, so that even an institution as large as the University of Oregon can't afford an electronic subscription to the full of ScienceDirect.
This is intolerable. It's particularly intolerable that the situation is so bad in Computer Science. Anyhow, I'm not alone in feeling this way. The Public Library of Science is working on it, Don Knuth thinks something is deeply wrong, congress might do something, and people are debating open access left and right. But right now, the state of the game is such that there are papers and journals that have PDFs that I CAN'T READ. And I would really like to read them. It is very frustrating to see an evocative title and abstract and then find out that they don't feel like showing me the PDF.
Phew. Okay. Had to get that off my chest.
In case you can't tell, I'm preparing for my area exam, which involves writing a precis of 50+ papers and bringing them all under some kind of unifying umbrella. Once I have done that and passed an oral exam, I will have "advanced to candidacy", and get a pay raise, and be "only" a dissertation away from PhD territory. But in the meantime, I have to figure out which papers to read and write about, and greedy publishers are getting in my way and taunting me with the fact that they have something I want, but I can't have it.
In an unrelated note, I have had more ideas and the code has gotten more featureful:
The idea bin has proven so useful that I'm going to half redo/half obsolete some old work that I did with Dan Stutzbach and, instead of making a paper heap, I'm going to make a paper bin. I don't need to know which one to read next, instead I need one place that has all the papers and precis and BibTeX files that can be browsable from the web, but edited easily using an editor that I actually want to use (vim). I am too whimsical and have a hard time following instructions that say "read this next", so as long as I have all of the "to be read and summarized" papers in one place, as well as all the summaries, I'm all good.
This is intolerable. It's particularly intolerable that the situation is so bad in Computer Science. Anyhow, I'm not alone in feeling this way. The Public Library of Science is working on it, Don Knuth thinks something is deeply wrong, congress might do something, and people are debating open access left and right. But right now, the state of the game is such that there are papers and journals that have PDFs that I CAN'T READ. And I would really like to read them. It is very frustrating to see an evocative title and abstract and then find out that they don't feel like showing me the PDF.
Phew. Okay. Had to get that off my chest.
In case you can't tell, I'm preparing for my area exam, which involves writing a precis of 50+ papers and bringing them all under some kind of unifying umbrella. Once I have done that and passed an oral exam, I will have "advanced to candidacy", and get a pay raise, and be "only" a dissertation away from PhD territory. But in the meantime, I have to figure out which papers to read and write about, and greedy publishers are getting in my way and taunting me with the fact that they have something I want, but I can't have it.
In an unrelated note, I have had more ideas and the code has gotten more featureful:
- /current is the most recent idea
- Only the 10 most recent ideas show up in RSS
- In the RSS there's a little +n thing to let you (really me) know how many comments an item has on it
The idea bin has proven so useful that I'm going to half redo/half obsolete some old work that I did with Dan Stutzbach and, instead of making a paper heap, I'm going to make a paper bin. I don't need to know which one to read next, instead I need one place that has all the papers and precis and BibTeX files that can be browsable from the web, but edited easily using an editor that I actually want to use (vim). I am too whimsical and have a hard time following instructions that say "read this next", so as long as I have all of the "to be read and summarized" papers in one place, as well as all the summaries, I'm all good.
