Paul Sutton @zleap@qoto.org

# On Publishing And Publishers

TLDR: a quick overview of the situation scientific publishers created and ways to partially solve the problem, or rather bypass it.

Tags: #qotojournal #sciense #publishing #essay

1. Introduction

There is a problem in our world, that is not widely talked about, especially on media. These are scientific journal publishers, or rather the system that they have established a long time ago and keep using (and monetizing) to this day. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for capitalism, it's when it gets in the way of important things when I get slightly disappointed.

Let's agree on the important stuff first: the era of lonely geniuses is long time over. The science and scientific advancements in the 21st century depend on cooperation of dozens, hundreds and thousands of people throughout the centuries. Information obtained years and decades ago is used to build new knowledge upon. A student in my faculty is required to have at least 20 citations in their coursework in the end of the first year, and it's not an issue - we usually approach 30 mentioned sources and research even more while doing the literature review. This is a bare minimum to become acquainted with the material. Scientific knowledge can be represented as a tree graph, with it's roots in ancient philosophy and it's leaves reaching into quantum physics and abstract algebra. To cherish the fruit of this tree, one needs to reach it's branches or, abstaining from the methaphore, to research everything that has already been done.

The access to this knowledge in the current model is pricey: one article costs between 30 and 50 dollars and journal subscriptions are expensive even for universities. Of course we violate the law and use Sci-hub extensively. This is very wrong, fundamentally wrong: people should be able to do their work legally, especially when this work is to solve humanities' problems and improve peoples' lives on the broadest scale possible. And don't get me started on the trouble it takes to do the fact-checking on all the articles that are on the web. It would have been so much easier to just read the source. Tough luck!

So there is, as I have mentioned, Sci-hub: illegal, but convenient and free way to obtain most of the articles, otherwise paywalled. For downloading textbooks and various books libgen is very handy and very illegal. Sometimes useng orchid or researchgate is possible to contact authors and request a full-text and even ask a few questions, but this is slow and inconvenient; not everyone is on these plaforms, which makes things worse. There is no way to quickly dismantle the "rule" of publishers, the have been around since the beginning of 20th century. They claim to be important because of the peer-review but I am unsure whether the peer-reviewing is that expensive, especially in modern world.

2. Analysis

So let's list the benefits of scientific publishing. There are some, obviously, and I'm not here to deny them.
1) Peer review. The most important step to keep most of the junk out of the system. Here I refer to pseudoscience and badly written papers as "junk" to save some space.
2) Verification of scientists and institution affiliations. This makes the industry exclusive, but keeps junk out of the system, again.
3) Storing articles and providing a way to access them via identification system (doi).
4) Keeping track of citations.

Now let's get to downsides. There is plenty, as mentioned above.
1) Paywalls.
2) Very slow system.
3) No way to communicate with authors.
4) Publishers have control over the entire thing.

Now It would be fair to have a look at alternatives and what they can provide. I'm writing this without references so please correct me if something is off.

Sci-hub: free way to bypass paywalls. Solves problem 1, creates legal problem.
Researchgate and orchid: a way to communicate with authors. Solves problem 3 partially.
oaDOI and similar sites: they keep track of open-access articles, this partially and legally solves prolem 1.

That's it for the most part. It's not like publishers are going anywhere, as well as doi system. Not in the near future. Maybe we'll come up with something better than sci-hub, maybe torrent-like system for rticles, who knows. Verification of articles can theoretically be done using blockchain technology. I have no idea what's next or how to solve the problem, but I am putting Alexandra Elbakyan in my "acknowledgements" list.

Dixi.

Interesting fact of the day: The same effect that cuased light in a prism to split up into different colors is what ultimately caused the first transatlantic telegraphic wire in 1858 to fail.

Morse code is transmitted as on-off signals, effectively square waves. Square waves are in fact made up of many different frequencies. Like in a prism different frequencies move at different speeds through a wire. Therefore as the on-off pulses traveled through the transatlantic telegraph wire the signal spread out like it does in a prism and ultimately the pulses would overlap and be indistinguishable.

The effect was so extreme that it took a message of only 98 words (the first message sent) over 67 minutes to send one way and a whopping 16 hours to confirm the message.

Whitehouse, a doctor with little mathematical understanding, thought he could solve the problem by increasing voltage, which we now know was a futile effort. He increased the voltage to the point he managed to short out the cable entirely and made it useless. However Lord Kelvin had already warned of the problem as was ignored and he came up with the law of squares to describe the problem which later was refined to give us the telegraphers equation. The telegraphers equation is still used today to model feedlines in radio transmitters and receivers.

#Science #STEM #Physics #History @Science #QOTOJournal

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@selea
Depends on the study. We arent talking about a single isolated study here but a pattern of evidence across several studies.

The only way to directly test for the number of infections prevented would be to intentionally expose people to the virus and see how they respond. Anything in the wild would have to be tested for indirectly and then we are back at the initial problem of post hoc proctor hoc for i direct inference.

The point is you can ask all sorts of questions we cant assert any answer about with any confidence. All we know is what direct evidence we have suggests yhe vaccine has no benefit against delta.

As i said before despite the fact that vaccine probably has no benefit of any kind id still advice people take it because it poses no risk and there is uncertainty about if it might help in some small way, so why not take it even if there is only a small chance it might help?

@phoenix

@zleap
Its only good when its cooked long and hot. Needs a little crispyness to it imo. I would get the dutch equivalent a lot.
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Losing Confidence in the Pillars of Our Civilization
Victor Davis Hanson|Posted: Nov 24, 2021 6:06 AM

Millions of citizens long ago concluded that professional sports, academia, and entertainment were no longer disinterested institutions, but far Left and deliberately hostile to Middle America.

https://townhall.com/columnists/victordavishanson/2021/11/24/losing-confidence-in-the-pillars-of-our-civilization-n2599609

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