Uzique The Lesser wrote:
firstly, how is it "boundless snobbery" to insist non-specialists don't dictate the content of specialists work? it's the same sentiments dilbert would feel if a manager with a business/finance degree tried to look over his shoulder and give advice/direction on his engineering design. the exact same thing. if you're going to publicly fund academics, that's fine, but do so with the traditional (and key) principle of 'free enquiry' intact. science/maths directed towards 'profitable' or 'patent-able' ends does not create great intellectual development. a manager derived from a managerial-business class telling a person with 20+ years of research experience 'what to do' is a rankling idea. "boundless snobbery"? please. boundless bias and petty resentment, maybe.
and no, knowledge is not "the most easily transferred commodity". if it was, universities would be in ruins. everyone would be taking online courses or enrolling at open universities. the fact is the university still has a lot of benefits and premiums on 'knowledge' - or at least enough to still argue practically for their benefits w/r/t an international cachet of scholars and ambitious workers. and no, "academic writing" is not "available for free". it never has been. the main corpus of it likely never will be. it is extremely expensive for a lay-person to get access to an academic journal. could your statements be any more factually incorrect? you have been posting in this thread for months with a seemingly obstinate insistence on being wrong, yet arguing as if you have a clue...
oh, and before you rant about that fact (which i won't have the pleasure to read), let me disclaim by saying it's a reality of the publishing industry, not academia. academics have to negotiate and deal with the measures/economics imposed on their work by the academic publishing industry themselves. many academics are trying to reform that, and are starting 'outsider' journals with open-access at their core. so don't use that as more stupid ammo in your dumb anti-academia arguments. not that research or facts have interested you thus far...
Um lets see.
If the guy looking over my shoulder is the guy paying my salary, or responsible for the budget which pays my salary he's free to say whatever he wants, he's free to ignore my input, put me through the third degree questioning my analysis and judgement, whatever.
If I turned around to him and said "I demand you give me four years pay to do whatever it is I feel like doing, which may be nothing useful, you stupid philistine" that would put me on a par with you and your demand that the people who fund academia should have no input or expect any useful return.
In academia knowledge has to be published to be accepted yes? Pretty hard to get those valuable citations, papers in peer-reviewed journals, book deals etc if you just keep it in your drawer no?
Compared with industry costs, professional fees etc, journal prices and access to academic databases are laughably cheap. And presumably you've heard of libraries, where all this stuff is available for nothing on the day of publication?
I'm not even sure what you're saying, getting access to academic journals is 'extremely expensive', whatever that means, but there are moves afoot to change over to open access? So won't that make it free(er) to everyone?
I can get access to the following for free (and no doubt anyone could in return for a small donation or by signing up for a course).
E-journals and Databases
Online access to a large and growing selection of academic resources is available to University alumni at no charge. There are presently over 20,000 e-journals, magazines, newspapers, and over 12,000 e-books and reports available to Alumni through the University of Adelaide Library.
What is available?
Complete lists of the journal titles available through these resources appear below [not all titles listed are available to the University]:
■Academic Search Alumni* - covers 3000 journals in most areas of the sciences, social sciences and humanities.
■Business Source Alumni<* - covers 6200 journals and 1,700 ebooks in marketing, management, MIS, accounting, finance, econometrics, economics and more./em>
■Annual Reviews - review articles in many areas of academic enquiry.
■CSIRO Journals - important Australian research reports in agriculture, biological and health sciences
■Oxford English Dictionary - the most authoritative and complete dictionary of the English language
■Oxford Journals Online - 200 high quality research journals covering a broad range of subjects
■PressDisplay - Cover-to-cover presentation online of the print versions of over 1100 newspapers from around the world. Backfile is 30 days. All titles are browseable and searchable.
■Project MUSE - over 300 top humanities and social sciences journals from US university presses
■SourceOECD - includes everything published by the OECD (books, journals, series, working papers, databases) on subjects as diverse as general economy, statistics, agriculture, science, future studies and the environment.
■SpringerLINK - Springer is the second-largest journal publisher worldwide, with over 1200 journals and 3 million articles available.
■Taylor & Francis Journals - T&F are among the largest journal publishers in the world. Alumni can, for 2010-11, join current University staff and students in accessing over 1000 T&F journals.
Free doesn't sound cripplingly expensive.
Last edited by Dilbert_X (2013-05-06 03:21:26)