BF2S Forums D&ST - Science

Uzique The Lesser wrote:

Dilbert_X wrote:

Uzique The Lesser wrote:

here's the cost, per issue, of one academic journal. one. i use about 25-30 for every piece of work i do.

have fun.

http://www.oxfordjournals.org/our_journ … _list.html

and how many people do you think go to their alma mater's library, where they have an alumni card/membership, to read one new journal article? that's a long way to go every single month to keep abreast of the latest cutting-edge research, no? you are talking shit. you said all academic information is free, when it patently isn't. the fact you can access it in a library doesn't mean it's 'free', it means a library with favorable financial arrangements with the publishers are covering all the costs for you. have fun taking a 4 hour train-ride and paying £50 for a day-trip every time you need to access a journal. so 'free'.

plus, i already told you, in today's age of online resources and research scholarship, it's very rare to find a library that stocks every single journal. they will only keep a subscription to a 'useful'/specifically demanded list. and have fun requesting a library get a journal in for you when you are no longer an enrolled student.  "hi there, i'm a random guy, nice library by the way. could you spend a few thousand and get an annual subscription to a journal for me? i'm trying to prove a point on the internet, you see"

I could, if I could be bothered, access Oxford Journals Online, for free, as I already posted, if you'd been paying attention.

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.

http://www.adelaide.edu.au/library/memb … lumni.html
All I need to do is dig out my union card and I'm in.
https://login.proxy.library.adelaide.ed … ournals%2f

nothing about that is free. you need to pay membership to the library to get that access.

or you need to have been to university/be an alumni. funny how a £30,000+ education is 'free access' to you.

also adelaide's particular access policy is far from standard fare, or universal.

At my uni it's 90 bucks a year for a library card if you're an alumni, 180 if you're a "community member," probably meaning if you live in the state/ sydney.

Alumni with Library cards can use UNSW Library computers and can access a limited number of databases via Library computers. Library cards can also be encoded so that credit can be added for photocopying and printing.

https://www.alumni.unsw.edu.au/sslpage.aspx?pid=307

Spark wrote:

ANU is pretty good with access and that sort of thing but ANU is unusually well funded as far as Australian universities go.

Well I'm not exactly going to take a 4 hour one way bus ride from sydney to ANU just to read some journals ANU has access to xD.

to even use my alma mater's library you have to be an alumni. no guests can walk in and sit around, using the resources. the library is in a fucking castle, and you need a card to even get inside it. obviously they're not that cool with the idea of random people walking around a building that contains £100mill+ of famous/valuable paintings draping the walls. you can literally only even access the collections for day-use if you have a library/alum card. and alumni can only access 'open journal' material published by the university, if you want some future journal usage. the university isn't big enough to warrant letting its alumni access normal journals. most universities are like this, outside of major cities. the costs are simply way too high to let any alum access a journal forever.

but yeah, academic information is 'free'. . .

oh, they let this guy in for free access though... i guess that's one way to access the library without paying!!!!1

Last edited by Uzique The Lesser (2013-05-06 03:58:09)

Uzique The Lesser wrote:

to even use my alma mater's library you have to be an alumni. no guests can walk in and sit around, using the resources. the library is in a fucking castle, and you need a card to even get inside it. obviously they're not that cool with the idea of random people walking around a building that contains £100mill+ of famous/valuable paintings draping the walls. you can literally only even access the collections for day-use if you have a library/alum card. and alumni can only access 'open journal' material published by the university, if you want some future journal usage. the university isn't big enough to warrant letting its alumni access normal journals. most universities are like this, outside of major cities. the costs are simply way too high to let any alum access a journal forever.

but yeah, academic information is 'free'. . .

oh, they let this guy in for free access though... i guess that's one way to access the library without paying!!!!1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptZbLWFzxpQ

If the public purse has paid for it don't you think the public should have free access to it?

Dilbert_X wrote:

Uzique The Lesser wrote:

to even use my alma mater's library you have to be an alumni. no guests can walk in and sit around, using the resources. the library is in a fucking castle, and you need a card to even get inside it. obviously they're not that cool with the idea of random people walking around a building that contains £100mill+ of famous/valuable paintings draping the walls. you can literally only even access the collections for day-use if you have a library/alum card. and alumni can only access 'open journal' material published by the university, if you want some future journal usage. the university isn't big enough to warrant letting its alumni access normal journals. most universities are like this, outside of major cities. the costs are simply way too high to let any alum access a journal forever.

but yeah, academic information is 'free'. . .

oh, they let this guy in for free access though... i guess that's one way to access the library without paying!!!!1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptZbLWFzxpQ

If the public purse has paid for it don't you think the public should have free access to it?

now we're back 4 pages to what i said to jay. i agree in principle that information should be easier to access for free. however you just wasted 4 pages to now tacitly admit the information/access is far from free. it is, in fact, prohibitively expensive/impractical to access. exactly. as. we've. been. saying. for. four. pages. so thanks for wasting everyone's time with your incoherent bluster, yet again.

about which, me and spark have already made very rational contributions. it "should" be free, but there are lots of costs and charges associated with academic publishing that are not directly financed by the public purse. academics do 'work' for journals that falls outside of their public-purse university salary and its job responsibilities. academic publishing is not publicly financed - they are often private enterprises, arranging their own printing and publishing services. they have a cost. plus there is the thorny legal issue of copyright/patents/intellectual property. because the academic is funded, does that mean everything his brain creates should be public property? it was that way in soviet russia, with soviet scientists and researchers: "we pay your salary, everything you create belongs to the State". however that model hasn't really been adopted anywhere other than 1960's cold war russia. have fun with that.

ok dilbert let me know the next time you find a journal article you'd like to read, and how you manage to get it for free.

at the moment i'm doing academc work long distance, with only an alumni account, and i can tell you if it wasn't for my being able to hijack my girlfriend's fully-paid-up account, i would not be able to do the work i am doing. i'd say that's fairly "exclusive", or 'prohibitive'. i don't know why you're trying to be pathetic and twist this into us academics delighting in the fact our information is 'hard to access', like it's a point of snob pride. how fucking inane. no one has once thought of it like that. it's specialist work that incurs a very high labour cost. much of the production is held by large private publishing companies. it costs a hefty price. that's just the fiscal reality. nobody is turning that into a point of academic snob pride.

you have serious neuroses when it comes to academia. an irrational idée fixe. you embarrass yourself in these discussions. a grown man trying to sleight academics, or 'prove a point' against all factual reality, just because you hold some root grudge against professors. it's very strange. academic material costs a lot of money to access. that's just The Way It Is.

and no, i never said i "think the philistines should keep out". i said i'd like it to be free, ideally. i also said i realize the process of submitting/editing/peer-review/publishing incurs many costs, which are not covered by public money. are you suggesting an academic should give away their intellectual property for free, and then cover the charges that his salary/funding do not? how curious. i'm not sure many professionals would do this, from any background. do engineers often contract out themselves for public/council work, with no charge?

Last edited by Uzique The Lesser (2013-05-06 04:11:38)

"so cheap as to not matter". i already linked you a resource showing that, for private citizens/individuals, it costs about £60+ per journal. have fun doing any serious research or corroborating any results/reviews using only one journal. you're going to need to balance that with several others. at £60 a piece. or, depending on your university and its individual arrangements, you can maybe access some/a limited supply of journals, for, again, a yearly fee. which varies in price. "so cheap as to not matter"? i don't know. i'd say paying £100+ a year to read a few 5 page journal articles is not really 'cheap'. not when it comes to accessing the printed word of any description. in fact, i'd say it's about as big an expense as you could find anywhere, for that volume of writing.

Uzique The Lesser wrote:

Dilbert_X wrote:

You're simply wrong, thats all.

Obviously getting hold of the most obscure academic works is going to be tricky, but mainstream, esp science, stuff is easily accessed with a tiny bit of effort at minimal or no cost.

$25 for an article? The time to read it would cost most people more.

ok dilbert. i'm simply wrong. so are the other current university students and academic researchers here. we're all "simply wrong". the guy with dozens of firefox tabs open right now, accessing academic journals, is "simply wrong". unbelievable.

and yes, all of our examples thus far have been "obscure academic works". that's why! we're linking esoterica. of course!

like that oxford criticism journal i linked. hopelessly recondite. so terribly remote and niche.

youre such an idiot uzique paying for academic articles. dont you know you can find it for free?

fucking mong.

i love how for this entire page dilbert has been making the statement "you're simply wrong" about 'academic information is free', but then he LITERALLY hedges his posts RIGHT AFTER with some dumb remark about "$25 per access? that's nothing!". lol. that's what you call a stubborn or deluded man. or a very sad troll. "simply wrong" stating that academic information is not free, okay. but then entering a paragraph break and boasting about how $25 per access is pocket change. "simply wrong, it's free". "$25 per journal is nothing". uuuuuuum.

Last edited by Uzique The Lesser (2013-05-06 04:24:57)

Whatever, its either free - by various routes - or so cheap as to not matter. $180 is pretty cheap if you're doing research.

Its not complex, surely you can get it.

no guests can walk in and sit around, using the resources. the library is in a fucking castle, and you need a card to even get inside it. obviously they're not that cool with the idea of random people walking around a building that contains £100mill+ of famous/valuable paintings draping the walls.

They let snotty students in, it can't be that big a deal.

Dilbert_X wrote:

Whatever, its either free - by various routes - or so cheap as to not matter. $180 is pretty cheap if you're doing research.

Its not complex, surely you can get it.

no guests can walk in and sit around, using the resources. the library is in a fucking castle, and you need a card to even get inside it. obviously they're not that cool with the idea of random people walking around a building that contains £100mill+ of famous/valuable paintings draping the walls.

They let snotty students in, it can't be that big a deal.

students have membership swipe cards. to open the door. you idiot.

and no, "free" and "$180 to check one topic of research" are not the same thing. most people don't spend $180 a year on BOOKS. let alone to check a few pithy journal articles. how is that FREE? as i said: that's just about as EXPENSIVE a premium as you can pay on the printed word in ANY FORM. tell me one other form of encountering/reading the written word that charges $25 dollars per 5 pages. tell me one. "so cheap as to not matter".

and you kept making this argument in the name of the 'public'. i'm not sure how many members of 'the public' you could approach on a high-street who would be inclined to pay $25 to check an article out of curiosity. most wouldn't even bother subscribing to bloody Reader's Digest.

you really are a fool. stop posting here. you don't add anything to discussions. you just drag the topics sidewards with your inane anti-academic drivel.

again, that depends wholly on the institution. your alma mater isn't snotty, but then again its a science institution, so it hardly stocks every single journal that a person could want. only, in fact, precisely the "bofty and obscure" science papers. so no wonder it's free. academic research is not "free" to access. it has a cost. if you can find a library near you that offers the journal you need, then you are very fortunate. however it is still not 'free'. i wonder how many people travel to london to consult imperial's free science resources? and you talk about 'obscure'.

Its cheap though.