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| Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, January 16 2013 @ 11:57 AM EST |
Considering the secret but substantial amounts of money that public universities
and colleges get as a result of research for the government and the DoD, it's
ludicrous that students must pay anything in tuition to the wealthier ones. I
know the bait dangled in front of schools in military and government research
proposals, all list the civilian applications of that results of research can
yield. With today's patent lawsuit happy environment, these schools are acting
as NPEs, hiring law firms to troll for licensing payments on patents the schools
applied for, and were granted, on taxpayer funded projects.
Myself, I remember when MIT was one school in dozens that pimped their medical
departments, clinics, research labs and facilities out for government and
military research involving non-consenting human experiments.
In the end, the public relations hype aside, schools are money driven and, to
differing degrees, most have adopted a for profit model over the last 20 years
or so. Anything to make a buck and more money can be made without a conscience
than with with one.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, January 16 2013 @ 02:59 PM EST |
To a layman like me it makes sense that
government funded research
should be
published in a freely available form
Depending on the
agency, publisher and
authors, a lot of published research and even the raw
data
(see NCBI) is freely available. For example, NIH's
Public Access
Policy provides public
access using PubMed Central
(which is not pubmed). Certain publishers like Plos.org are completely
open-access and, for
other publishers, many authors will
also pay
so that their article is
open-access. Other publishers may
make old articles freely available.
There
other useful options to find this research. Google, in
particular, Google
scholar that may link to a freely
available version. JSTOR provides free
access for really old journals as well as not quite free
Register & Read
(must register). Depending on the
institution, you can probably use their
library resources
for free but you must check the terms. Also there are
some
places like citeseer where usually pre-published
articles are available but
those may not pass peer-review.
While requesting offsets is no
longer
possible, some people will actually send you a copy
of the
article if
requested. [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: Wol on Wednesday, January 16 2013 @ 04:52 PM EST |
The reason for that is the (relatively) small print runs.
The marginal cost of both books is the same. But the fixed costs are spread over
far fewer copies for a textbook than for a best seller.
I can't speak as to whether the costs are reasonable or not, and whether the
"right" people get to see any of the money, but certainly at Uni
level, textbooks are going to be expensive. And don't expect e-books to reduce
this cost that much (at least, certainly if you want *decent* e-books rather
than professors self-publishing to their classes).
Cheers,
Wol[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, January 16 2013 @ 10:45 PM EST |
Not every paper requires sophisticated analysis. Assume a person finds a paper
where the explanation isn't sufficient for many readers. Or maybe only be
insufficient for one reader (the author of the reanalysis).
Most papers don't have raw data. Hence, a person might have to ask the author
for a copy of their raw data.
But, is there a limit as to how much of a paper a person can reproduce, where
the purpose of this (explanatory) paper is to explain how the original author
came to the conclusion they did? Which presumably also allows for rebuttal
papers to show how the original author did things incorrectly.
While it may not be a goal, But if people are allowed to analyze or rebut
leading articles in any journal (including those tightly held), including
journals which have an OpenAccess policy, it is entirely possible that most good
science articles can eventually end up in the open access model. And all it
might seemingly require is access to the raw data from the original researchers,
which is never published anyway.
[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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