[X] My Assistant

[jrdahlman]

I'm not sure if this topic is substantive enough to be posted under Doug's new rules, but I'll try it.

Computer and hardware pioneer Don Lancaster (still going strong), in his blog on April 2, had an interesting take on the "Gresham's Law" effect that amateur internet posting is having on traditional publishing. For scientists:

But Scholarly Journal Publishers clearly have the most serious problems. If they are to survive at all. Sloppy researcher "A" throws some crap up on the web and instantly delivers zillions of free copies worldwide. Competent researcher "B" pays an outrageous fee to have his peer-review paper published in the distant future in a journal so expensive that their institution's own library cannot afford a copy. Guess who wins?

At the very least, scholarly journal survival demands unlimited free instant access of all abstracts without so such as a registration hassle. Combined with sanely limited quantities of free access to any paper over five years old.

http://www.tinaja.com/whtnu06.asp


I am not a scientist, but clearly there are many on this board. This topic may have been mentioned before, but I'm wondering if any of you have heard anything from the journal publishers themselves? Is this really becoming a problem? Is the market changing or fees rising? Are they getting nervous about the economics of it? Are researchers equally nervous? Not leading questions--I actually don't know.

(One of the amazing things about this board for outsiders is seeing "science being made." The back-and-forth debates between geologists, alternate (plausable!) theories, etc., as opposed to the dry official reports that are finally released. I feel almost like a spy in on closed sessions!)

[Guest_Richard Trigaux_*]

Interesting remarks, DonPMitchell and dvandorn.

I would just add that , in more of Mensa people, I also had to deal with ordinary people, non-cultivated people, and even people with somewhat low IQ. And I clearly prefer persons who have little intelligence, but who use it to be nice people, or who use it to understand life and happiness. Those people are far more useful to society that people who use a large intelligence to build weapons, or more subtly but more dangerous, to muddle simple questions (happiness, meaning of life, climate change...) and make of them complicated debates requiring constant sanity checks and debunking of many specious arguments.


Back to topic, it is true that modern communication means, and especially Internet, improved the ease of expressing ideas, and especially new or leading edge ideas, in every domains (science, unknown phenomena, philosophy, social, politics, environment, spirituality...). We have much more signals than, say, in the 17th century, and much better quality signals. But the terrible drawback which comes is that we have a much lower signal/noise ratio, as now everybody is able to publish any personnal though, theory, rant or nutter idea. We see this in the domain of this forum: there are many interesting discutions, but much more nutters, kooks, hoaglandites, guies who think we never went on the Moon, etc. And it is the same in EVERY DOMAIN!!!! For instance in spirituality we have sects, fundamentalists, nutters, etc. some being really nasty.

So, with my opinion, the only solution is something which more or less work like a peer referee system, formal or unformal:
-formal peer referee in reference science reviews
-unformal recognition of "what is best in the domain" when doing unformal work, personal sites, writing books, etc.

I would like to show what I did myself on my own site (dealing with subjects like environment, spirituality, unexplained phenomenon, happiness...)
-show a selection (often a narrow selection) of the best sources, sites, books... on a given subject
-shortly debunk common misunderstanding, or provide warnings if an however interesting resource arises a problem
-organize subjects by relation
-not visible, but important, I several times removed links to inaccurate or biased sources
This is a brief example of how to all together organize an unformal but accurate network of reliable knowledge. If everybody serious does the same, link pages of this kind will constitute a small but efficient network between knowledgeable/serious information sources, a bit like Wikipedia.


Perhaps Wikipedia will become some kind of standard, but that will depend of how they deal with controversies, who wins and is published on the Wiki, who works in the background to expell some and retain others. I don't examined in details, but in some instance they don't elude controversies (we cannot), just giving the various opinions. But there are controversies and controversies. "Is there life on Mars?" is a question nobody can answer today, so the various arguments must be given. But a question like "were the Apollo missions faked?" is even not worth mentioning it (unless we are specialists into denouncing false science or manipulations).