/sci/ - Science & Math

[Anonymous No.4760722]

What journals do you read/subscribe to?

[Anonymous No.4760733]

whichever has the article I'm looking for

[Anonymous No.4760734]

What? You must have mistaken /sci/ for a place where actually care about science.

But in all seriousness, I scrounge arXiv for .pdfs because I'm a poorfag.

[Anonymous No.4760741]

American Physics Society. It's free the first year for physics majors. I'll definitely renew my membership, as they let you select a variety of journals and forums to get updates on, send you Physics Today in th mail, and have lots of career guidance for students

[Anonymous No.4762632]

>>4760741
just got my free trial, thanks

[Anonymous No.4762639]

subscribe to journals? lol. athens gives me access to everything, but honestly i rarely read any of them. most publications are esoteric nonsense of interest to only a teeny tiny subset of people in a very specific field. any journals big enough to make an impact end up doing the rounds on news sites and the like, so really there's no reason to bother with them unless you're a professional academic.

plus journals are fucking abhorrent, and within 5 years will be dead. mark my words, the US will pass laws guaranteeing free publication of any and all research performed with public money, destroying elsevier's business model for good. it can't come soon enough.

[Anonymous No.4762657]

>>4762639
>journals will be dead in 5 years

You don't actually understand how law works, do you? While I absolutely do not approve of the model of charging people for what should be freely distributed knowledge(Buying access to a single article usually costs 30-40 dollars PER ARTICLE which is insane), journals are going to keep doing it for years to come. The thing is, most people who need to read journals work at a company with company subscriptions to all relevant journals, or are college students whose colleges have college subscriptions to all relevant journals. I agree that research should be public, but it is not going to happen with the current court system. A decision like that would take at least a decade to reach, and they will not just screw over a whole bunch of companies that have made a living on charging for knowledge for years. That's why it's taking so long to get rid of gene patents - It'd screw over a whole bunch of companies that have been making a living on charging for diagnostic tests for years.

Also OP, I subscribe to Nature. It's not a great journal when it comes to articles since they force researchers to apply to ridiculous page limits and as a result force them to condense their work to an often illegible mess. Not only that, but they often select only the newest and most 'ground-breaking' research to publish too quickly, despite the fact that a lot of it will not be supported by any future developments.

They have good reviews, articles and special features, though, and the first half of the magazine keeps you up to date with what's currently going on, so that's cool.

[Anonymous No.4762668]

>>4762639
So, how's high school treating you?

[Anonymous No.4762674]

>>4762657
you're dumb. if congress passed a law tomorrow requiring all publicly funded research in the US to be freely available, as is already required for things like NASA's research, or works produced by members of the armed forces in the process of their duties (excepting classification, of course), every single thing Elsevier publish would disappear. They'd have nothing to publish.

Commercial research is rarely published in Elsevier's journals, and any "private" research published is usually publicly funded. All of the articles in the most recent issue of nature contain significant public components, for example.

How do you think elsevier would continue to carry on for a decade if they were effectively banned from publishing just about all research carried out in the US?

[Anonymous No.4762677]

>>4762668
>athens
>high school

u dumb boy

[Anonymous No.4762679]

>>4762674

No, you're dumb. I'm not saying that a law wouldn't hinder what a journal could charge for, I'm saying that it'd take years before such a law would be approved since there would be an immense controversy around it.

[Anonymous No.4762680]

>>4762674
You're a fucking idiot. Do you know how much it costs to publish a paper in open access journals?

[Anonymous No.4762685]

>>4762680
£2-3000 last time we checked, but open access journals aren't the only option. The point is more that we're living in the 21st fucking century, why are we still distributing our scientific advances on fucking paper in fucking magazines?

ArXiV will become the model for the standard operating practice of 21st century publishing. Then you'll feel dumb for being wrong.

[Anonymous No.4762688]

>>4762679
>No, you're dumb. I'm not saying that a law wouldn't hinder what a journal could charge for, I'm saying that it'd take years before such a law would be approved since there would be an immense controversy around it.

i don't think you understand how the law works, son. besides, there wouldn't be any controversy about it. it's already standard practice for everything else. the only body who stand to lose out from such a piece of legislation are elsevier, a dutch company that no one really likes anyway.

[Anonymous No.4762692]

>>4762685
>ArXiV will become the model for the standard operating practice of 21st century publishing.

So, you are saying that publishing scientific papers in non-peer-reviewed collections will become a standard?

[Anonymous No.4762697]

>>4760722
All of them?

>>4762657
>The thing is, most people who need to read journals work at a company with company subscriptions to all relevant journals, or are college students whose colleges have college subscriptions to all relevant journals.
^This.
>>4762639
>journals big enough to make an impact end up doing the rounds on news sites and the like, so really there's no reason to bother with them unless you're a professional academic.
^And this.

You only read a paper when you need, no one browses through the databases looking for something interesting, everything interesting can be found through various pop-sci media (which is usually free). There's a reason it's called "popular science" you know.

[Anonymous No.4762699]

>>4762692
>So, you are saying that publishing scientific papers in non-peer-reviewed collections will become a standard?

Yes. It's not like publishing something to arxiv precludes peer review.

This is part of the point. Elsevier justify their absurd costs by trotting out the usual "BUT ALL OUR ARTICLES ARE REVIEWED HURHRUHR". Elsevier *don't pay anyone for the review*. They add absolutely nothing to the process other than a brand name. They buy the research, place limits on its form, on its discussion in public, hand it to some unpaid reviewers who're doing the job for cred and then sell the thing for $50 a fucking copy.

They brand science. That is wrong. Research should be freely available, how else do we guarantee the review process?

[Anonymous No.4762702]

>>4762697
>various pop-sci media (which is usually free).

...and where the quality of reporting is worth every penny you pay

[Anonymous No.4762706]

>>4762699
Everything you say is correct, but it's extremely naive that anything will change, let alone that it will change because of the law .
btw. there is already a law that says all NIH funded research should be open access, but taxpayers are the one that end up paying to publish it.

[Anonymous No.4762704]

>>4762688

Uh, most major journals charge for their articles, not just Elsevier.

[Anonymous No.4762709]

>>4762702
>...and where the quality of reporting is worth every penny you pay

Yeah, but it's easy to go find the original publication (unless your uni doesn't subscribe to the journal, in which case, transfer to a better uni).

[Anonymous No.4762713]

>>4762704
you can treat "Elsevier" as a surrogate term for "Major journal publishers, of which Elsevier is by far the biggest and the worst and therefore a handy company to refer to".

[Anonymous No.4763836]

Nature is the left wing version of the Daily Mail in the scientific community.

[Anonymous No.4763890]

The economist
Business week
American Statistics Association

[Anonymous No.4763924]

The only thing I pay for is Lapham's Quarterly. All of the math I'm going to study for the next 3 semester was discovered before ~1950. If something comes up in colloquium I'll go and harass the reference librarian.