Hacker News Reader

>Common. You probably are a college student, or the original poster is, or both were thus know full well that you get free access to the journals you need when you are a student.

That's entirely false. If there was a single distribution point that charged a nominal fee, that would be one thing, but to do any significant research you need at least 5 such £30 monthly subscriptions, and no school subscribes to all journals a student might want.

>If you do not pay for it, well not you precisely, but the professionals who work in that field, then the funds would be taken either away from research or from students.

I'd like to meet the professionals that buy these papers. I get the distinct impression it's mostly professors, students, and universities paying these outrageous fees.

Personally, I'm a professional now and if I needed a paper relevant to my work I would buy it. But I don't need it. Very few professionals need any sort of academic papers, especially in CS. We've got the whole Internet, from Wikipedia to Github to this very site to get information about trends, and we offer it for free because we know that hiding information is more trouble than it's worth (and it's much easier for us to work when those around us freely share.)

no school subscribes to all journals a student might want.

I went to a crappy (but huge) state university and they did indeed subscribe to ALL of the journals. My family has a good number of academics and this seems to be the case at any large university, regardless of quality.

I went to a ~3000 student private liberal arts college and we subscribed to a handful. 90% of what I needed was out of reach. I suspect there are some economies of scale, but those economies are completely artificial; there's no reason the per-student rate should be different for a small college than a large one.

Well, I suppose there is one: most of the cost is administrative overhead in actually collecting the bill, so it's easier if you've got one bill for 40k as opposed to one bill for 3k

What you needed, not the students.

I was a student (now graduated). And I was not alone in lacking needed resources. I had numerous friends in other departments who complained of lacking needed journal articles.

Desirable and necessary resources are different. The entirety of the night in regards to hacker news however has been quite revealing.

This place is no less a waste of time than telly. Your insistence simply proves so. Anyone who has been in a university just knows that they had access to the journals they needed, but perhaps not some they might have wanted to.

Yet regardless, neither helps us in our endeavour. Whether the person publishes all the journal articles, I care little. This is no longer a community. No longer are etiquettes and the culture of the site enforced, it is a play ground instead where populism wins.

That is fine, that is how things have been working. You go there first and leave when so it becomes. Yet I thought naively perhaps that this time it would be different.

It is not. Only in the physical world is it different, only in the physical world do we have the freedom, for in that sphere, nature has had the advantage of many years.

Not even the best and brightest can come even close to it. Though maybe I am just naive to suggest that PG is either of those in regards to the internet. He is of a different generation, of a different age too, in his 40s or 50s, chasing money or whatever he chases.

This is our net to make. Ours to learn the mistakes and implement their solutions.

Long Live Youth perhaps I should have said.

>Desirable and necessary resources are different.

That's a bit of a retreat from where your argument was.

But yes, I'm sorry HN is becoming such an echo chamber with no regard for honest discourse. In a lot of ways I prefer Reddit, since there's no pretension that the downvotes are anything other than a mindless disagree.

Honestly, I think that pg probably has it backwards, and that comments should be flag-only while posts should have downvotes. Of course, any system is vulnerable to abuse given enough time.

How did we get here from academic journal pricing?

This should perhaps be my last comment on this.

On your first point. I was a student and during that time I had access to all the papers I needed, sufficient papers to get the top grades.

Second, I do not know what profession you are in, computer science is very different from medicine. To start with, the latter requires actual physical stuff, you know, people you can experiment with, or monkeys, and substances, like bleach, and an actual physical space, rather than simply a computer and some time.

I understand that my opinion is in the minority. I understand too that most of you bright smart angels are trying to find loopholes in my reasoning or arguments. I am not however pleased at all with having the entire people of reason and intelligence set against like leaches.

This is a discussion. Not of an adversarial kind, but of a collaborative nature, where people of reason and intelligence try to arrive at a conclusion, rather than win one over. If I gather this wrong, then that is my bad. My intention however was to suggest as to how things taking in consideration practical matters, matters of principle, matters of a complex nature and combined by my own self, derives at simply copying a journal article and putting it on your web page to be no different than my buying the application you sell and putting it on my web page for free for all others to use as they please.

If reason is dead in this place and what counts is the "I am right", then that is fine.

Long Live Liberty of Choice.

>On your first point. I was a student and during that time I had access to all the papers I needed, sufficent papers to get the top grades.

Where did you go to school? From my experience yours is most atypical.

I don't sell applications. I configure and make slight modifications to free applications, or applications my employer pays for (and in my experience the ones that charge have negative value from my perspective, while the free ones save me hours of time.) So feel free to copy my code and documentation and put it all online. Those that aren't available online are only closed because I felt my clients/employers wouldn't appreciate their free availability. You would be giving me a great 'out' to give back to the community.

But yes, reason has little purchase in this place. The community has very strong biases and refuses to give time to opposition.

That said, long live liberty.

"But yes, reason has little purchase in this place. The community has very strong biases and refuses to give time to opposition."

What exactly do you mean?

You're being downvoted purely because people disagree with you. HN is supposed to be above that.

While I didn't downvote him, I agree with the downvoters. His substantive claims about how the research/peer review system works -- upon which is entire argument is based -- are factually incorrect.

(I really wanted to write a reasoned rebuttal, but the more I read your posts here the less I can figure out exactly what you've intended to say. Maybe some of this disagreement is due to a misunderstanding over writing.)

There are quite literally thousands of relevant journals for a college to subscribe to, and institutional access is fantastically expensive. In fact, the cost of journal access here in the US has expanded year over year far faster than inflation or any other information resource, and now consumes the majority of library budgets at many colleges.

That "free access" you were talking about for students? Physical Review alone runs from $17,000 to $32,000 annually. Now imagine maintaining a few hundred of those subscriptions.

On the other side of things, I have published in Physical Review Letters, and was disillusioned with the editorial/peer review process. You're hopelessly constrained for length, but asked to remove key sentences while expanding abbreviations. Because it's extremely difficult to explain your work in such a short space, your reviewers can focus on details you know deserve explanation but simply can't include for brevity--or worse, misunderstand your research entirely.

Let's face it: this is only a problem for dead-tree publishers. We could double the page limits for online articles at negligible cost, and I would argue, decreased difficulty for reviewers and referees.

Some people have raised more political concerns about the review process, but I don't understand those as fully.

[edit] I should make it clear that I greatly value the work being done by APS and journals in organizing, qualifying, and sharing high-value correspondence. I simply believe there may be a space for open-access journals as well.

I'm sorry, but there is no excuse whatsoever for that old bloated system for distribution to continue to exist. Sure, editors have value, sure, peer review should be rewarded. But trying to create artificial scarcity by bringing an outdated distribution model to the online world doesn't make sense. Any pdf is just a few hops away on most social networks anyway, so it's not like their paywalls are stopping anyone.

"old bloated system"

You mean the same one that google uses for, amongst other things, to measure authority?

I am fine with kicking the old system into oblivion. I am not fine with doing so before suggesting a new system however. I simply do not see how, in this chaotic internet where everyone has an opinion and is able to communicate it to the entire world, we can differentiate between objective solid stuff, and mere speculation.

If we are for freedom, then lets us have such freedom. Let us not frown at wikileaks if they publish deep and damaging secrets, let us not be defensive when our own content is concerned and copied, let us so too resist any attempts of the real law, say the law of defamation to apply to the internet, let us be cool with bittorrent and the way it distributes freely our content.

If that is the internet we wish, then fine, let us be the pioneers and disrupt all older notions.

If the above is extreme however, then let us be impartial and judge where the line ought to be not from a selfish perspective, not from an emotional or ideological perspective, but from a rational, detached, without favour or fear perspective.

That is the choice of our generation, but I submit, we can have only one of them. We can not be hypocrites when our own interests are concerned and guard them ferociously, yet fight to undermine the interests of others.