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Every. Single. Time. I have ever tried to read a scientific paper, this is what happens. It's complete crap. The research was done in a national laboratory, under public funding. I should be able to read this.
Fortunately, I am now a university student so I will see if the library can help me with this.
There should be the equivalent of wikileaks for scientific papers- a site where you can anonymously post them and their abstract. While I understand someone has to pay for hosting, archiving, validation- people should be allowed to view things like this freely. Otherwise, what is the point of research you wish to share with the public? Even viewing the paper as images with watermarks would be better than nothing.
My understanding is that many journals embed metadata about you when you download the full text of an article. If that's true, it would be crucial to make sure that it got stripped automatically when uploaded to such a site.
I don't know about anonymously -- why not just the centuries-old library model? We pay for an organization; the organization licenses the works; the organization lends out the works for free.
The current problem being that subscribed to an institution which has a library with the funds to pay for these things is currently either expensive or hard to get oneself affiliated with without lots of requirements and quirks. :/
I have access through my home institution, but I'm already dreading being suddenly cut-off from all of this information when I leave :/ - the idea that upon leaving the institution my ability or willingness to read existing content and contribute back should disappear is bothersome, to say the least.
only NIH has open access requirements, and they only kick in one year after publication. Could ask Ilya to authorchoice it, which is ACS's open-access option (costs $800 a pop).
It's just a bunch of text and diagrams. Can't they stick it on a $5 DO VM or even Dropbox?
Why do people bother with these crappy hosting services that require people to pay to see your content?
I am honestly asking what these people actually offer other than hosting. I'm totally up for setting up a little web app for hosting scientific papers, but what would be preventing me from competing with these people?
This "hosting service" is an academic journal.
They do not only host the document but also organize review of submitted papers, edit the document for publication, and ensure long-term archival of published works.
And - most important for academic researchers - publishing in a respected journal improves your reputation.
Once your paper gets published, you essentially sign away most rights to the publisher (see also the comment on Open Access in this discussion thread).
Whether these publishers contribute enough to warrant the high price of their publications is debatable.
Scientific publishing isn't just about putting stuff somewhere for people to read it. Publishers, through their parasitic relationship with academia, have kept themselves relevant through the critical mass of people continuing to use them.
The purpose served by publishers isn't really the hosting of articles, it's the names of journals the publishers own which carries an implication that top-tier journals get better reviewers and therefore higher quality articles. As long as academia values impact factor and journal rankings, the parasite can subsist.
Most academics tend to self-host preprints, or stick them on arXiv so the publisher as a hosting service isn't really the "value-add" offered.
>Fortunately, I am now a university student so I will see if the library can help me with this.
Many universities have a proxy site you can use to access journal articles without having to physically be on campus. You should find out if yours does this. I wish I had looked into it when I was a student. I had no idea the privilege I was letting slip away.
> their theories (surprise, surprise) provided support for these hand waving models
> These folk "knew" what they needed to obtain
If I hadn't seen the resemblance between the username and the first name on the linked publications, I would have closed the page and written it off as a pseudo-science blogger fighting big corporate interests. I just wish the user info page had his real name on it, for confirmation.
There was a honking big difference between pseudo-science and this blog post, and it was right at the start. Specifically:
"So I decided to find out - and I did! "
Followed up by a link to a published scientific article. Seriously, I don't know what your complaint is. There's a nice dry scientific paper, and a blog post with a more accessible tone. This seems like a pretty good mix of the different types of media (putting aside for now the issue of the paper being behind a bloody paywall).
Your reply to Jared is talking about quoting out of context. There is no quoting in this case. The guy is simply introducing the research paper that he himself wrote and got published. Seriously I have no idea what on earth you're going on about.
What sounds pseudo-science about the first main paragraph, "It turns out that...electrode."? I don't understand your reaction to some complaints about non-tested models.
After reading too many blogs trying to substantiate their claims by quoting science out of context, I never consider the first paragraph as proof of anything. The second paragraph turned from promoting an idea to almost accusing others of bias or misconduct, in a way that almost mimicked a conspiracy theory. I can understand the complaints about inadequately tested models, because that happens. (And, as there are a lot of russian language posts in the blog, perhaps it is a cultural language style I am unfamiliar with.) But, if it wasn't for the username looking similar to the name on the paper, I would have written it off.
Still, I think pseudo-science would use a quote as a springboard into something nonsensical, it wouldn't just say "these guys didn't do their job properly", it would do something like accuse them of actual conspiracy, or say that the answer was obvious because [inane blather].
"Nonsensical" and "inane blather" are relative to your personal knowledge and experience. Science and technology, to people outside of those fields, sounds like a string of nonsense jargon and technobabble. (That is one of the reasons why phys.org, university press departments, Congressman[1], and Fox News[2] can get things so very wrong.) My lack of a background in the detailed inner workings of Li-Ion batteries, or chemistry in general, prevents me from directly validating his statements. So, if it wasn't for the username looking similar to the first name on the paper, I would have written it off.
The point is that he didn't make any statement there. So you don't need any field knowledge to realize he didn't springboard into blather, because he didn't springboard into anything at all.
> When computational chemists got involved, their theories (surprise, surprise) provided support for these hand waving models. These folk "knew" what they needed to obtain - and they tweaked their models until they got it: the models are complex; there are lot of knobs to tweak. Incredibly, even on rare occasion when they got it right they dismissed their own results, ascribing discrepancies to model imperfections...
This is stupid. My research is molecular dynamics and ab initio studies of novel carbon anodes in lithium batteries. We don't "tweak" the model until it fits; if you did that you would be 1) an idiot 2) not a scientist.
All models describe reality only to an approximation. How well this approximation works depends on how good your model is. In computational science, we have algorithms that can almost perfectly match experimental carbon anodes. The only problem? These techniques (short of someone inventing a quantum computer) take essentially infinite time to run on a classical computer. So you cut down the computational complexity of your model by making approximations (e.g. removing electron-electron correlations) until you get something that can run on today's best supercomputers.
But you don't stop there! You have to actually assess these models and figure out how well they work! For instance, there's probably 20 or so MD models that describe water (TIP3P, TIP4P, etc...) Each model can accurately predict certain properties of real water, but is also very poor at predicting other properties. In other words, your model needs to fit what it was designed for and you will get good results.
It seems to me that most people who bash simulations nowadays are experimentalists that aren't up to date on the state-of-the-art algorithms that provide very good agreement with reality (for some situations at least).
To be honest, what you're saying is that to get a 'good model' - you have to 'tweak' these approximations it so they work well "to fit what it was designed for". Maybe you don't like the word 'tweaking' - but your entire post sounds that it is exactly that, make your model match (certain properties of) reality as close as possible.
I'm not saying that in a dismissive/judgmental way - it is probably the most realistic way of doing a lot of things - but it pretty much is exactly what the original post says (although he is dismissive/negative about this). I don't know enough about chemistry in general to comment on this, but we do have batteries and they do improve over time - so some people must be doing "something" right.
What surprises me more are his claims that we don't even understand (or understood) even the basics of lithium on a chemical level? Is this even true? What could be the impact of this paper on future battery development? Could computational models be improved using this data?
> but it pretty much is exactly what the original post says (although he is dismissive/negative about this)
The difference is that he is implying scientists tweak their models to get what they want to see; i.e., they have a hypothesis and then manipulate the model until it gives them results that confirm their hypothesis. This is bad science. What I'm saying is that scientists (should) create their model to fit reality for only the specific situations where it is provably applicable. If the model then confirms the hypothesis, great. If it doesn't, no big deal; it just means your hypothesis was wrong and you probably won't get a paper out of it (in an ideal world, we would publish papers about negative results because that is science as well, but I'm afraid those papers don't garner near the attention or interest that positive results do).
> What surprises me more are his claims that we don't even understand (or understood) even the basics of lithium on a chemical level? Is this even true?
Yeah, it's true. That's why me (and a whole lot of other people) are doing research in this area.
As for the paper, I'm not sure what its impact is. Research becomes very narrow in fields like this, and I don't study electrolytes (I study carbon anodes). So I can't comment on that.
Experiments are usually so expensive that you want to get the most out of them, so most people work discovering what experiments they should do, and what they do with the results, instead of just jumping in the lab and doing the experiments.
Then, sometimes, people with that culture face a problem just like this one, where blind experiments are the fastest, simplest, cheapest route to understanding something. Except that nobody knows it beforehand.
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/jp406274e http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/jp406273p"
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"Your current credentials do not allow retrieval of the full text.
Purchase This Content Choose from the following options: $35.00 for 48 hours of access Members, log in with your ACS ID to see your reduced price."
Every. Single. Time. I have ever tried to read a scientific paper, this is what happens. It's complete crap. The research was done in a national laboratory, under public funding. I should be able to read this.
Fortunately, I am now a university student so I will see if the library can help me with this.