/sci/ - Science & Math

Paywall is fucking garbage, I agree.

>>3654448
Corporate scam? That's fucking retarded.
>Without current knowledge, we cannot make coherent democratic decisions.
What makes you think your opinion on current issues in highly specialized fields matter? The pay wall is there to ensure those who need the papers for actual research have access to it via their institutions, and the ones that don't still have access, but this is not unlimited. If you don't have access to the journals, you don't need them. Simple as that.

>>3654490
you are such a fucking idiot

>>3654490

Have you read the article?

Research is funded by tax dollars but institution pay insane amount of money per year to have access to the published papers, which in turn increases student tuition and less money to actually do the research.

That's like public is giving it self a blowjob

In the modern day publishers are leeches, it's true of entertainment why would it not be true of academia?

>>3654503
Nice argument brah.
>>3654504
Can't say that I did.
>guardian.co.uk

>Research is funded by tax dollars but institution pay insane amount of money per year to have access to the published papers, which in turn increases student tuition and less money to actually do the research.
I see the point here though. I don't think it's all that bad. The price of the licenses is tremendously lower for institutions with bulk-subscriptions. If you put it in relative terms the price for access to journals isn't even a single percent of the cash flow of an average university. In return we have peer review of high standards, which is essential to doing science.

>>3654532
>The average cost of an annual subscription to a chemistry journal is $3,792.
>Some journals cost $10,000 a year or more to stock.
>The most expensive I’ve seen, Elsevier’s Biochimica et Biophysica Acta, is $20,930.
>Though academic libraries have been frantically cutting subscriptions to make ends meet, journals now consume 65% of their budgets.

That 20k/year could have been some biochem grad student stipend who would discover cancer cure, bro.

Also, why does some publisher fucker can make this much money from running a simple website?
> Elsevier’s operating-profit margin was 36% (£724m on revenues of £2 billion)

While I experience immerse amount of butthurt writing a thesis and can barely afford Top Ramen?

Fortunately, you can often find the preprint stashed on some website anyway. But yeah, paywalls suck.

>In return we have peer review of high standards
The reviewers are not paid.

>>3654556
Right, that's a license not for one student but for the entire student body. 20.00 dollars is fuck-all to a university.
>Though academic libraries have been frantically cutting subscriptions to make ends meet, journals now consume 65% of their budgets.
That's the libraries. They don't have the same cash-flow as the actual institution, obviously.

>Also, why does some publisher fucker can make this much money from running a simple website?
Because the higher the impact factor, the more they can charge.

>While I experience immerse amount of butthurt writing a thesis and can barely afford Top Ramen?
That's something that I have always found to be fucked up. I assume you live in the states. Where I live, tuition fees are much, much lower due to government subsidizing. I pay 1700 Euros for a year of tuition in my country's top university (in my respective field). The reason tuitions are that high is not because of journal subscriptions. That's a tiny fraction of the actual tuition.

>>3654564
>The reviewers are not paid.
I know. But the editors choose the reviewers. They need to be up to date in the field as much as the reviewers themselves.

>>3654605
People outside universities like to read papers, too. EE here, but I like economics and philosophy. I'm not saying I stay on top of everything published ever, but finding something interesting and seeing a price tag of retarded proportions (one digital paper costs more than a fucking hardcover at a bookstore) makes me rage pretty hard.

I don't give a fuck how it compares to other costs, it's too goddamn much.

>>3654624
Seeing a price tag higher than the cost of the bandwidth to transfer the data makes me rage pretty hard so I gotta say you're more lenient than I am.

I definitely agree that paywalling publishers are the scum of the Earth. Thankfully,

>PMC
>PLoS
>Bro tier scientists putting pdfs on their site

What do you guys think about the copyright business? Has anyone ever caught shit for "pirating" papers? I'd like to start some kind of exchange where you can let other people use your institutional access to get papers, without exposing your credentials or the institution's info.

>>3654624
Some universities offer alumni a university login so you still have access when you're graduated. Blame your university.

>>3654624
you sir

are the kind of person I wish I was friends with.

" the universal declaration of human rights, which says that "everyone has the right freely to … share in scientific advancement and its benefits"

Funniest thing I have read this year.

>>3654607
>I know. But the editors choose the reviewers. They need to be up to date in the field as much as the reviewers themselves.

So?

>>3654664
So that increases the price that comes with good peer review. It doesn't happen by itself.

>>3654673

What increases the price that comes with good peer review?

>>3654688
paying for good editors...

>>3654605
>That's the libraries. They don't have the same cash-flow as the actual institution, obviously.

I'm not sure what you're trying to say here.

The libraries of universities receive a budget from their institution every year. This budget includes buying licenses for access to journals.

There is no "cash-flow" anywhere but through the university library.

>>3654688

I wouldn't pay $40 to read 1 best paper instead of 10 not so best on the same topic but for free.

>>3654635
For sure the marginal cost of digital distribution is effectively zero, which in a perfectly competitive market would be the price, but I'll compromise in this imperfect world. If a hardcover costs $25, say, and the average book is 400 pages, then I'd gladly pay six cents, you know? Even for a digital copy. Hell, I'd pay a dime, if it helps them out.

>>3654657
Thx bro.

>>3654703

Wait, you really think that the editor's pay is a significant component of the cost of running a journal? What do you think this is, banking?

>>3654721
no clue how I saged there, so bump

>>3654448
>knowledge monopoly

LMFAO. That article is poorly written and fucking stupid. There is no knowledge monopoly.

Show me all these allegedy people that are missing out on fucking articles THAT THEY COULDNT EVEN UNDERSTAND ANYWAY.

Journals are a vestige of far earlier times, when the thing was a physical journal with many volumes, printed at low volume in butt-fuck middle of nowhere, and shipped to libraries. They're obsolete.

Scientists should just start using a free-to-submit, free-to-use website to publish research. Anyone can review and comment, and the site has various algorithms for estimating the reliability of someone's reviewers based on h-index and impact factors. Basically, if only unpublished fucks rated your shit positively, enjoy being at the bottom of the "most important publications this week" list. If Stephen Hawking thinks your cosmology paper is shit, enjoy a big red "article reliability: 1%" notice at the top greeting everyone who reads it.

It's just a matter of reaching critical mass. Once actually influential scientists began to participate, it would be just as reliable as any traditional peer-reviewed journal. The only expenditure is bandwidth, which can easily be solved with small text ads (which would be very profitable what with targeting and what not). The only difficulty is providing incentive for reviewers, and there's a million way to address that.

>>3654727
Christ, no, of course not. We got side tracked here.

>>3654736
ooooh i like this

>TECHNOLOGY SAVES THE DAY ONCE AGAIN

>>3654448
>publishers have slapped a padlock and a "keep out" sign on the gates

Nope. There is a big difference between POP-sci and real sci. Writer of the article is a fucking dipshit. The general public cannot understand peer-reviewed papers anyway, they shouldnt even be wasting there fucking time.

What they need to do is get a nice pop-sci book from B&N and stop bitching.

>>3654747

What do you mean? Your argument (as far as I understand it) is that journal access needs to be overpriced like hell, otherwise the journals wouldn't be able to afford good editors. Again, how much do you think they earn?

>>3654736
It's called "arXiv", enjoy

I once met a monopolist. He was really mean and he tried to bite me.

Christ who bites people in todays day and age?

>>3654774
you think thats funny? really. fuck off

>>3654736
I like this. But I'm left wondering whether researchers are left out. I was led to believe that under the current system an author is paid by the journal every time the paper is referenced. Surely this loss of financial incentive>>3654644
to the researches will hurt this scheme.

On the other hand the above sounds like the sort of thing that I made up and assumed was true, if so ignore it

>>3654644

I echo this guys question. How difficult would it be to pirate papers? After all pirated music, pirated TV and even pirated books are rapidly becoming the norm.

>>3654791

Funny? No I think its mean. People shouldnt be biting other people.

>>3654768

> Nope. There is a big difference between POP-sci and real sci. Writer of the article is a fucking dipshit.
> The general public cannot understand peer-reviewed papers anyway, they shouldnt even be wasting there fucking time.

All that research is funded by public, by tax payers, by my hard earned money. Who the hell are you to tell me what I can and can not read?

>>3654736

NO, then you get all sorts of non-sense bullshit in there. No serious scienists wants to spend time weeding out fucking troll papers from serious scientific works.

The system is fucking fine the way it is. You never really hear scienists bitch about it. The only people that bitch about it are a few laymen, who don't even really understand the articles anyway.

How do they come to own these papers?

>>3654768
Well this is entirely what's wrong with our society. Science should not be split into "pop science" and "real science." Science is not actually that hard to understand if you bother to do the reading, and massively overpricing text books and papers is preventing people from doing so.

>>3654808
> You never really hear scienists bitch about it.

You must be joking.

>>3654808

>You never really hear scienists bitch about it.

Are you actually in a scientific field doing research?

Because this is the least correct statement in this topic.

>>3654795

Do what this guy did
> http://uk.ibtimes.com/articles/184696/20110721/mit-s-public-domain-theft-leads-to-federal-hacking-ch
arges.htm

>>3654808
So because you have arbitrarily decided that they are too stupid to read science they're not allowed to even try? This stupid elitist attitude is exactly why the general public mistrusts science

>>3654772
But only for Physics, Math and CS so far. ;_;

Also, how does review work for papers only published on arXiv?

>>3654795
I've never heard of being paid for being cited. That would be very strange. What about dead authors?

I can think of incentive being: Prestige, algorithm somehow correlates your reliability score based on how well you've judged papers in the past, mandatory review count needed to publish, or even a simple cash bonus (maybe in relation to how important you are).

Or just make "commentary on paper" be a valid, citable format of publication.

The counter argument to this is shit. "They block access only to people who don't need the information."

I can't even begin to describe how much that enrages me. I want to read about new discoveries and research and find articles related to ideas I have, not passed-over shit posted on CNN.

>>3654807
>Who the hell are you to tell me what I can and can not read?
This, engraved in steel and mounted at the town square.

>>3654808
A "serious" scientist could simply look at only papers from high-impact scientists, or those he personally knows.

>>3654808

> No serious scienists wants to spend time weeding out fucking troll papers from serious scientific works.

Fine. Let the scientist pay for it via university account etc.

But if I read a reference paper in the bibliography that is interesting to me or to check the basis of the study. And that paper is the result of a NSF granted research, I want to read it for free, or at least not for $40 a copy.

What you're saying is, scientists should pay tons of money for super-good-search-engine-that-weeds-out-junk which is fine by me. But the entire content is public domain.

>>3654807
>who are you

A guy much smarter then you.

How about you stop your fucking bitching and go to your local bookstore.

All the pop-science you need is there. Stop wasting your time trying to actually understand real scientific journals kid.

Also, I fucked your mom.

2

How do they come to own these papers?

>>3654833
I love this man.

>>3654865
Do you mean journals? Sometimes by publishing, you forfeit rights to the text, then it's standard copyright bullshit. Sometimes you can still do whatever you want with your paper (often on the condition of not selling or making money from it), and give journal the right to sell access, reproduce the text, sue people for "pirating" it etc.

>>3654861
>Stop wasting your time trying to actually understand real scientific journals
I will kill you in your sleep.

Any research funded by the public must necessarily be co-released in a public journal.
That's not even a fucking argument. We got the money, we make the rules.
Why the fuck should the public pay money to look at research it paid for? What the fuck?
For everything else, do whatever the fuck you want

>>3654736
There are some problems with that though. Let's say there are two scientists who hate each other. One is a well known heavy hitter while the other is a mid-tier guy (see Smolin and Susskind). If the mid-tier scientist were to publish something decent and worthwhile the heavy hitter could give him a shit rating out of spite (as not all scientist are intellectually honest).

What does the publisher actually do? Just print and distribute it?

>>3654795
The guy asking the question here: I have access to an Ivy League school's subscriptions. I'd literally download and rapidshare any papers you want right now if you asked, I even did it on here before.

My only worry is, I'd get into much trouble if it was found out that I was doing this, and I will never take that chance- to submit my credentials to a site I would have to be in charge of the site, or it must have been very popular for a long time without issues, for me to be able to trust it.

Say some kind of script simply notifies me when someone requests a paper I want, then an open source lightweight client on my machine which knows my credentials (or asks me to enter them) downloads the pdfs automatically, then strips them of identifying information (this part has to be very secure) and uploads them to the central site, all without my credentials ever leaving my computer, I would so do this.

>>3654911

You download high enough volume and end up like Aaron Swartz.

Google him in news

>>3654897
Same thing happens already. You get assigned to review an enemy's paper, you send it back and tell the journal it's shit, the journal believes you because you're a bigshot.

Thing is, when one two-time Nobel prize winner thinks a paper sucks, while 5 other one-time laureates and 15 almost-laureates rate it good, he's gonna stick out like a sore thumb, and if he doesn't provide compelling reasons for his rating, people he will look petty in public.

/sci/,

I'm not a "math" guy (whatever the fuck that means), but I can usually understand things about math (meta-math?).

Anyway, can someone explain, in layman terms, Gödel's work to me? Specifically, why his incompleteness theorems were so monumental and groundbreaking in mathematics, and what are some of the theoretical or practical consequences of his findings?

>>3654923

Fuck, meant to post this on front page... obviously.

>>3654911
Sounds like a regular pirating distribution scheme. The problem would be getting all the information distributed properly because onion/garlic sites with proper amounts of anonymity are slow as shit and any other method would end with people being caught.

>>3654929
Just delete it. Check the check box and go to the bottom right corner of the page. The "password" is auto-generated and stored in your cookie so it's already typed in.

>>3654892
>We got the money, we make the rules

Nope. What are you 10? 12 years old?

The rules are made by those more knowledgable then you. They are usually made in the best interest of the general population.

It is in the best interest of the population that dumb people STAY THE FUCK OUT OF SCIENCE. This is why they created pop-science.

If the general public were more infulential in science, they would only fuck shit up CAUSE THEY HAVE NO IDEA WTF THEY ARE DOING.

>>3654924

Oh, come on, you really think that the editor would base his decision to publish or not on the review from the guy who's work is being criticized in the paper?

>>3654947

Now it's too obvious, sorry

>>3654921
That's exactly what I'd like to prevent. It seems:

1) I wouldn't be downloading millions, since for every 10 or even 100 people without access requesting papers, there should be, at least ideally, a helpful student, so volumes can remain reasonably low. (It's not like it's that strange for a student to look at a hundred papers a month through legit library access anyway)

2) Because identifying info is stripped, and requests, downloads and submissions are done at different times (hours or days apart, perhaps) there is no hard link between the site's activity and the person who downloaded, although if the article gets downloaded once a month then it would be a bit indefensible. I'm not sure how that would go.

3) Ideally it shouldn't be easy to say some anonymous person who submitted a paper to some online site is the same as some student who downloaded it at so and so. You could also arrange it so that, for example, 10 random people download it at close times, and only one submits, so it's impossible to say which one infringed on copyright.

The real problem is, even the suspicion or accusation of such a thing would potentially ruin your reputation and career, especially for a grad student.

>>3654947
As oppose to now when the dumb people don't know what nuclear power, stem cells or GM actually do and fuck shit up without actually bothering to check for themselves what they do because they've been told they're too thick to understand it

>>3654898
They are incharge of initial peer-review, picking the relevant referees and shit.

>>3654948
It happens. What do you think reviewers are for? Besides, it's quite often that a nobody's paper will contradict a famous guy's work, and the nobody will be wrong, which the famous guy will point out.

I'm pretty sure they try not to pick people in direct conflict when possible, but if he's an expert in the field he's an expert in the field. You can't just ignore a fucking god-tier dude's opinion because he might disagree, and reviewers are expected to be impartial, objective and honest in any case.

>>3654964
It would have to be very exclusive then.
Also stripping information might be difficult. Normal identifications made by the OS are easy to remove, the problem is when a journal decides to add per-user markers to each file downloaded. You'd need to strip the content of the file without any of the data (which is possible since PDF standards were made royalty-free since 2008)

>>3654968
I'd like to add something, too: With what we have know, no scientist bothers making a paper layman-friendly because no layman will read it because of paywalls. In fact, they try to over complicate it so that it looks important and smart, and the journal is more likely to accept it (I know it sounds stupid, but this is well documented). So it's a bit of a feedback thing.

hurr durr I support the status quo

>>3654968
Scientific journals are not gonna clear up the publics common misconceptions and misunderstanhding of BASIC FUCKING SCIENCE. Hell, they aint gonna clear up anything that is below post-doctoral level knowledge. That is what POP-SCIENCE Books (or even intro textbooks) are for.

Scientific Journal articles often DO NOT COVER THE BASICS OR ANYTHING AT A LEVEL THE PUBLIC CAN UNDERSTAND. Instead they are very very very specific and very advanced, and fucking assume you already have doctortate level knowledge in the field. The general public is just not prepared to read a fucking scientific journal article (most journals). Nor is it helpful for them to try.

>>3654993

I see you have very little experience with the review process. Critical papers are actually sent to people who are being criticized quite often, however their opinion is weighted against the other reviewers, no matter important the person is. Otherwise, would would be the point?

>>3654998
Exclusive? Why? Like I said, shouldn't be possible to really link activity on the site with a given subscriber library's given student user in a beyond-reasonable-doubt sense.

As for stripping, I don't know of current journals watermarking shit at all, except literally one small journal which adds a front page with your IP on it. But then again, who knows what they stuff in those pdfs... But you should still be able to extract the text, and probably figures, quite safely. Photos, I dunno. Seem potentially quite hazardous.

BTW, for anyone who needs free papers: Google PubMed Central and PLoS (the journal). You can also find recent issues of Nature and Science, probably a few other big journals, on torrent trackers like TPB.

>>3655016

fuck.

*no matter how important
*what would be the point

>>3655001
SCIENTIFIC JOURNAL ARTICLES ARE FUCKING MADE FOR SCIENTISTS DUMBSHIT!

Why the fuck would they dumbshit down? There audience is other scientists! The journals are made for people with post doctorate level knowledge to discusss new knowledge.

>>3655012
Doctorate level seems a bit high, most my undergraduate work was done from journals and that was only the year after finishing school

>>3655012

Go back to USSR to dictate what people want, lobotomized troll.

>>3655011
Oh hai Ayn Sagan

>>3655012
I don't understand your vehement obsession with stopping a layperson from reading a scientific paper. You seem to think that the worst that could happen is not that the person gets bored, confused and puts it down but that there are some mystical secrets within journals that we must defend at any cost

>>3654964
Why the fuck would your risk your carrer to give a few hicks some articles they can't even understand?

>>3655053

You are arguing with a troll. Why are you arguing with a troll?

>>3655012
Actually, the abstract is often very simple, especially in social sciences, non-in depth climate science, biology, medicine, pharmacology, and so on. Looking at the results and interpreting whether they really mean what the paper says they mean takes some work, but even undergrad freshmen can do it, so can't be that big a deal. Looking at their methods and figuring out which one is error-prone, and to what extent their findings might be artifacts of their experimental routine isn't that easy, but if it's in a famous journal that avenue would be explored during the review process.

PMC came about because patients and their relatives complained they couldn't look at literature before surgery/treatment to weigh the options their doctor gave them, so yeah, not so opaque after all.

>>3655056

i like this troll, he keeps bumping this to further discussion.

>>3655064

But the discussion is turning to crap because of him.

>>3655024
Anything more than exclusive would get shut down, it's essential a pirating site.

>>3655055
Admittedly, it's stupid, but fuck that shit. I could have went into business or engineering, and had a six-figure salary, a tiny work day, and respect from my underlings by now. I went into science because I believe in making a difference.

By the way, not every school is subscribed to every journal, and sometimes you're tracking down an obscure citation, and a paper you REALLY need is in a walled journal, and you're fucked. It hurts scientists, students at least, too, not just hicks.

>>3655076
Like sites for movie, software and music piracy?

What's even the demand for paywalled journal piracy, anyway? I bet there's more people out there willing to share papers than are willing to download them. There have been in my experience.

>>3655053
>>3655053
Do you remember climate-gate? shit like that arises from the public trying to "do science".

Basically, NOTHING FUCKING HAPPENED IN CLIMATE-GATE, NO CHARGES, NO FRADULANET OR UNETHICAL ACTIVITY. NO ONE WAS FOUND TO HAVE DONE ANYTHING WRONG.

Still, now half of america thinks "global warming is a hoax", WTF AMERICA! Bascially cause they jumped to false conclusions.

The general public is so fucking prone to jumping to false conculsions, and not thinking rationally, that any little thing could set them off down some fucked up path of no return.

>>3655102

The thing is, most people who read scientific journals aren't low life hobos that just crave free shit. They try to abide by a higher ethic standard and usually creative enough to gain access to the interested paper without breaking paywall license. Simply having piratebay for science papers isn't a solution. This shit needs to be dealt with legally.

>>3655127

The general public is just not level headed enough to take scientific papers as they are intended to be taken (no fucking jumping to conlcusions, just assimalate the knowledge, and give time for peer-review and follow up).

If you dont give proper time for peer-review and follow up, THEN YOU MISS THE WHOLE FUCKING POINT OF SCIENCE.

Some one publised some study that vaccines are bad. What do scienists to, peer-review, futher follow up, alot of thinking. What does the general public do....VACCINES ARE EVIL! AND NOW A FEW EXTRA 1000 KIDS DIE WACH EACH YEAR.

Yeah, general public sucks ass.

>>3655127

Uh, no.
"Shit like that" arises from powerful industrial and political interests interfering with science. Half of America thinks AGW is a hoax because they associate it with big government.

>>3655127
Go fuck yourself. If you think the general public has a knowledge problem, paywalls aren't the answer, they're the cause.

Please leave /sci/ forever.

>>3655142

>Some one publised some study that vaccines are bad

Was that paper open access or paywalled?

>>3655130
Technically, and this is a bit blurry from what I find but, if I have access to a paper and my buddy doesn't, I am legally allowed to show the paper to my buddy. No surprise, since people do this all the time: Students exchange papers to discuss them, professors print out papers and distribute them to the class, scientists send their, and others' papers to prospective students and colleagues, and so on.

Technically, a "pirate bay for papers" is perfectly legal, since it's no different than the above. But if the journals panic, they may decide that the above somehow doesn't apply to internet communications or something, even though they have no rational reason why, and even though you can produce logs showing a given paper is downloaded a handful of times anyway.

They do have the resources to bullshit a court into complying with such inane lines of thought. Question is, would they? As far as I can see, all bets are off on that one.

>>3655130
Yes, but in general, there is no "problem". There is not any great "outrage" by scientists for the costs of these papers.

The status quo will stay the same, simply case not enough scienists give a shit to change it, nor do they wanna take time to figure out a better system.

IF IT AINT BROKE, DON'T FIX IT.

>>3654448
>academic publishing
>a system by which scientists give the raw materials (papers) and labour (peer review) freely, and pay to get the information back

Yeah I could have told you this ages ago.

>>3655180
>scientists don't care
Then how do you explain PLoS, a journal with free access, which charges people like a thousand dollars to publish? Influential scientists actually go and pay extra money, quite a bit of it, to publish in a journal simply because it is open. I'd say they care.

>>3655090
Had so many problems with this for my dissertation.

>>3655152
>>3655152
Do you understand what a scientific article in a scientific journal even looks like?

In general 85% of the words in it will be unfamilar to anyone in the general public. These words won't be in any standard dictonary either. There meanings will all come from upper-level grauduate textbooks, or other journal articles.

PAPERS LIKE THIS DO NO HELP THE GENERAL PUBLIC IN ANY FORM.

Why the fuck do you keep assuming that having acess to articles like this will somehow help the general public? THEY CANT EVEN READ THE SHIT!

>>3655090
>By the way, not every school is subscribed to every journal, and sometimes you're tracking down an obscure citation, and a paper you REALLY need is in a walled journal, and you're fucked. It hurts scientists, students at least, too, not just hicks.

Fucking this. God damn you Physica Status Solidi, you fucking cunt.

>>3655216
Yes, I do know what they look like. I read them. I've paid for them when I want to read them bad enough.

>>3655216

I think this really only applies to math and physics type things.
Most layman should be able to understand the majority of biology and chemistry papers, if obstinate and obscure language weren't used simply for the sake of using it.

These are also the type of papers that the public SHOULD have access to. How many times does some soccer mom hear that such and such causes cancer on TV but then when she tries to actually research it, she is paywalled at every turn.

>>3655203
>obsecure website with some medical papers

LMFAO
"The overwhelming majority of scienistsit dont give a shit", is that wording better for you

>>3655216
Here's an abstract from a random Nature study that had a thread here earlier today. doi:10.1038/mp.2011.85

General intelligence is an important human quantitative trait that accounts for much of the
variation in diverse cognitive abilities. Individual differences in intelligence are strongly
associated with many important life outcomes, including educational and occupational
attainments, income, health and lifespan. Data from twin and family studies are consistent with
a high heritability of intelligence, but this inference has been controversial. We conducted a
genome-wide analysis of 3511 unrelated adults with data on 549692 single nucleotide
polymorphisms (SNPs) and detailed phenotypes on cognitive traits. We estimate that 40% of
the variation in crystallized-type intelligence and 51% of the variation in fluid-type intelligence
between individuals is accounted for by linkage disequilibrium between genotyped common
SNP markers and unknown causal variants. These estimates provide lower bounds for the
narrow-sense heritability of the traits. We partitioned genetic variation on individual
chromosomes and found that, on average, longer chromosomes explain more variation.
Finally, using just SNP data we predicted B1% of the variance of crystallized and fluid
cognitive phenotypes in an independent sample (P=0.009 and 0.028, respectively). Our results
unequivocally confirm that a substantial proportion of individual differences in human
intelligence is due to genetic variation, and are consistent with many genes of small effects
underlying the additive genetic influences on intelligence.

You would have to be stupid to not get the gist of the results, and even a slightly intelligent high schooler could figure out what SNPs, crystallized and fluid intelligence means after 5 minutes of googling.

>>3655216
not every field is theoretical physics.
There are shittons of experimental papers that could be easily understood by someone with a bachelors in the right subject, and plenty that could be understood by people without that bachelors.

>>3655260
PLoS is obscure? Are you kidding me? PLoS One has 4 impact factor and PLoS Biology has 12 to Nature's 30 and Science's 28. It's not the best out there, but I wouldn't call that fucking obscure.

>>3655262
Quite so. Good papers are written so that they are clear and concise, and use language appropriate to the subject. This chap's complaints are foolish.

>>3655262
Another was some time back, which got lots of interest here: doi:10.1088/1741-2560/8/4/046017

A primary objective in developing a neural prosthesis is to replace neural circuitry in the brain
that no longer functions appropriately. Such a goal requires artificial reconstruction of
neuron-to-neuron connections in a way that can be recognized by the remaining normal
circuitry, and that promotes appropriate interaction. In this study, the application of a specially
designed neural prosthesis using a multi-input/multi-output (MIMO) nonlinear model is
demonstrated by using trains of electrical stimulation pulses to substitute for MIMO model
derived ensemble firing patterns. Ensembles of CA3 and CA1 hippocampal neurons, recorded
from rats performing a delayed-nonmatch-to-sample (DNMS) memory task, exhibited
successful encoding of trial-specific sample lever information in the form of different
spatiotemporal firing patterns. MIMO patterns, identified online and in real-time, were
employed within a closed-loop behavioral paradigm. Results showed that the model was able
to predict successful performance on the same trial. Also, MIMO model-derived patterns,
delivered as electrical stimulation to the same electrodes, improved performance under normal
testing conditions and, more importantly, were capable of recovering performance when
delivered to animals with ensemble hippocampal activity compromised by pharmacologic
blockade of synaptic transmission. These integrated experimental-modeling studies show for
the first time that, with sufficient information about the neural coding of memories, a neural
prosthesis capable of real-time diagnosis and manipulation of the encoding process can restore
and even enhance cognitive, mnemonic processes.

Again, some terms crop up, they are not essential to understand the conclusion, and it's trivial to figure out what they refer to.

>>3655246
>only math and physics

Nope

>laymen should be able to read biology and chemistry

Hell No. It's the same shit nigger. In Bio and chem it can get even worse case you got all the stochimetry and nomenclature and shit. It is not readable by the general public at fucking all.

>Soccor mom researching

YOU ARE FUCKING DELUSIONAL KID

>>3655262
>NATURE

LMFAO. Nature is just slightly just better then pop-science. Nature is pretty much like popular mechanic.

It is a very very dumbed multidiciplcary journal YOU FUCKING MORON. Most articles are incomplete and forward you to another journal for the complete article/study.

>>3655343
>Nature is just slightly just better then pop-science.
Well, thanks for bumping the thread, I guess.

>>3655343
>Nature is just slightly just better then pop-science. Nature is pretty much like popular mechanic.

I guess you're mad that Nature rejected your article?

>>3655293
>Thinks someone who didnt go to college can actually follow that

>>3655386
> he thinks people that go to college can read

>>3655307
You have an unreasonably low opinion of people. Even in stupid ol' America, over 25% of people have a bachelor's degree. They're certainly capable of reading publications in journals. There's a difference between having the level of skill required to corroborate or develop research in papers and just read them for content.

Not, apparently, that you'd know, since you seem to have never read a paper outside your field to see if you could follow all the big words.

hey scientist leftist, explain this shit

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_Freedom_of_the_World

leftist policies are only acceptable if your cognitive dissonance is immense

>>3655416
i'm a leftist and my cognitive whatsit is zero, as measured by ayn rand's magic orgone accumulator

explain that rightist munchkin

>>3655407
>unreasonably low opinion of people
>25% of people have a bachelor's degree

So 25% is supposed to be good then?
Are you on drugs?

>>3655437
What? It's supposed to indicate that there are plenty of people capable of reading publications in journals. Which is, of course, exactly what I said.

>>3655175
>>3655180

Teachers can copy pages from a copyrighted book to give their students, it falls under Fair Use [1] (http://copyright.gov/fls/fl102.html))

The paywall journals claim copyrights to submitted paper. Which is still ok to use for education purpose (Fair Use) but they will sue for any other use.

>>3655402
>>3655307

You're are obviously a troll, but it's worth point out...

This is a very similar argument to that held by church during the Dark ages. Church intentionally kept the bible in Latin so nobody could read it except the ordained ministers which resulted in all kinds of shitstorm starting from crusades to indulgence, absolution, etc until Martin Luther made his 95 thesis.

>>3654448
>see sexy picture
>come to thread
>its just words
>no more sexy pictures
Fuck this thread and fuck you.

op here

cant' be bothered reading all this shit

just agree with me

>>3655386
It took me 2 Googles to figure that out and I just graduated high school.

>>3655386
This type of intellectual elitism is what kept me from taking science classes. I took calc 3 (AP b/c) in high school, but I couldn't have been bothered to take AP bio bc everyone in that class had an outwardly snobby attitude. Everyone in AP was bright, but only a handful would've been willing to learn on their own, no matter take the courses I was.

>>3655527
They intentionally did that because it was the word of god, and since religion is the first seious study of psychology and sociology (aka economics) they understood that language forms perception.

It's like if you're a C++ programmer and you stop enforcing syntax formatting, you end up with a pile of unreadable shit..

>>3655386
I'm an undergrad, and I had no problem following that.

Didn't recognize all of the terms, but caught enough to figure out what they were saying, not to mention if I were interested enough to read the paper I would probably have done some background research as well.

0/10 not even mad.

>>3655527
Actually, the initial reason for restricting spiritual writings to Latin is the same reason Latin is the language of science today; it's dead. You're talking the pre-printing press era, where bibles were scarce and penned by hand. Latin ensures slang, alternative/outdated words, and the like wouldn't find their way into the book.

Of course, it did end up making it easier for the religious authorities to pull shit out of their ass for their own profit, instead of what modern religious authorities are forced to do (twist obscure texts to their own ends), which was a standing reason to keep it Latin, even after the invention of the printing press.

It's just that saying the bible was kept in latin just to keep it out of the hands of the unwashed masses is historically inaccurate Protestant propaganda.

Um, who cares?

Can someone say "first world problems"?

>>3657547
gtb2reddit

This is a science board discussing a serious science issue, besides the third world's underfunded libraries are most vulnerable to this in the first place.

>>3654736
There are some problems with that though. Let's say there are two scientists who hate each other. One is a well known heavy hitter while the other is a mid-tier guy (see Smolin and Susskind). If the mid-tier scientist were to publish something decent and worthwhile the heavy hitter could give him a shit rating out of spite (as not all scientist are intellectually honest).