Irony of the Day: Academic Edition
Look at the screenshot below of these Google Scholar search results. The first entry is what looks like a pretty definitive study. It's published in Science, one of the most respected, if not the most respected, omnibus scientific journals on the planet. And its authors hail from some of the top public/federal research facilities and universities.
But, if you click through to actually read the article, you can't, at least not without paying $32. But, in this case, you can read the PDF of the full paper for free by clicking on the link to the right...a link that goes to the Urmia University of Medical Sciences. In Iran.
So, we're faced with the situation where US public research funds were spent to support research, which is then published by a for-profit company that charges the public (again) to read the results. But no matter, the Trump administration has put a gag order on federal climate scientists publishing their findings, so we won't even have papers like this in the future to not be able to read without going to a sanctioned nation's academic institution.
This entire situation seems to violate every principle of what's right, yet I don't see many academics criticizing it publicly or attempting to challenge it outright.
There's no incentive for them to make it easy to read the research we've paid for with public funds. Ferengi Rule of Acquisition 70: Get the money first, then let the buyer worry about collecting the merchandise.
ReplyDeleteBoth John Baez and Timothy Gowers have been very vocal about the private publishers that have put so many academic papers behind paywalls.
ReplyDeleteOur federal conservative government also put gag orders on scientists, forcing them to route all media requests through political flacks in Ottawa. Not sure what it is about conservatives that makes them hate free speech; they make a big show about being all about freedom. The scientists actually negotiated their free speech rights into a new contract that they just signed in December.
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/12/canadas-government-scientists-get-anti-muzzling-clause-contract-0
smithsonianmag.com - Canadian Scientists Explain Exactly How Their Government Silenced Science
There's also sci-hub - I've got thousands of academic papers from using that.
ReplyDeleteCameron Wright
ReplyDeleteOh, can you send a link or can I just google "sci-hub"?
Gabrielle Aydnwylde Best to Google it. The US keeps blocking DNS to it, so it tends to move around from name to name. sci-hub.cc seems to be the current one. I use it frequently.
ReplyDeleteBrian Holt Hawthorne Many thanks!
ReplyDeleteBernd Einfeldt Are you an academic or scientific researcher? Just curious about how familiar you are with how research actually happens.
ReplyDeleteBernd Einfeldt "Climate change looks roughly speaking at long term weather pattern changes, hundred years or more." No. That is an incorrect definition of what climate change research looks at. You might want to read up a bit on it.
ReplyDeleteBernd Einfeldt The totality. "Research" is a multi-faceted enterprise and one that differs substantially in practice across disciplines.
ReplyDeleteBernd Einfeldt(null) I'm not sure what you want to define, as your statements confuse and misuse so many different terms.. Climate change is a term that refers to changes in climate. It doesn't look at anything. In includes anthropogenic climate change, long-term climate change, and many other phenomena. Climate change research is the study of those changes, their causes, and their effects. Climate itself is orthogonal to weather, so your claim about weather patterns over hundreds of years is a red herring.
ReplyDelete