Excellent idea! It never crossed my mind to buy a temporary license just to 
check it out. I doubt there would be risk of accusations of reverse engineering 
because I'm unlikely to code something others would find acceptable.

The only relevant question I have about publishing would be the expert 
criticism of the peer reviewers (and the herding of such done by the editors). 
I value that criticism and often end up taking the critic's side *against* my 
co-authors ... because I'm a jerk that way. Of course, you can get 
undisciplined criticism from any yahoo on Reddit. But there's a discipline 
encoded in any given editors' roster of reliable critics. So, it's not the 
recording-ideas-forever that brings value. It's that rolodex roster, and the 
good faith participation of them, that's valuable. It would be nice if good 
faith criticism were not merely profitable, but something people wanted to do 
as a part of their community.


On 12/3/20 2:40 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> There's another side to this, which is that people who sell things often try 
> as hard as they can to make those things seem essential and otherwise 
> out-of-reach.   To lead potential customers into thinking there is energy 
> barrier where there really isn't.   I find I sometimes buy software or a 
> (text)book when I just want to know if there is any there, there.   If I 
> really need it, invariably I end up using open source software.   For 
> example, I can't imagine going back to ArcGIS as now there are QGIS an 
> various geotools for R (the latter two which are free).  This luxury of being 
> able to a bit of lookahead by, well, wasting some money, is what LMIC 
> scientists can't do.   Likewise one could carefully engineer some code to do 
> run quickly, or just slam down some slow scripts on a cluster and waste some 
> energy and get the same answer.  It's not so clear to me that the academic 
> publishing industry really adds a whole lot of value.  Heck, it's not so 
> clear to me that recording ideas forever is really all that useful either, 
> but that's another story. 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Friam <[email protected]> On Behalf Of u?l? ???
> Sent: Thursday, December 3, 2020 10:34 AM
> To: [email protected]
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] How Prestige Journals Remain Elite, Exclusive And 
> Exclusionary | beSpacific
> 
>> “Nature might as well post a sign that says "LMICs scientists not welcome 
>> here", said Catherine Kyobutungi, Executive Director at the African 
>> Population and Health Research Center. “Nature is out of touch with reality. 
>> It is a daily struggle for institutions like ours to financially support our 
>> researchers to pay open access fees. A few funders pay these fees but only 
>> for papers coming out of projects they have funded. I don't know in which 
>> world Nature thinks it's okay to charge fees equal to or more than the small 
>> grants many LMICs researchers can access,” she added.
> 
> It's not well-summed-up by "prestige". This topic came up in FriAM, recently, 
> wherein I objected to purchasing a proprietary tool to replicate the research 
> of another group, preferring a tool that *is* more available to LMIC 
> researchers like R. It was amazing to me that I had to make this argument at 
> all, much less the privileged counter-arguments being made, e.g. that 
> ~$1000/yr for that software wasn't significant compared to what I was being 
> paid. I'd much rather donate $1000/yr to the R Foundation than propagate the 
> pay-to-play game being offered.
> 
> There's bound to be a similar model for publications.
> 
> On 12/3/20 9:42 AM, Tom Johnson wrote:
>> https://www.bespacific.com/how-prestige-journals-remain-elite-exclusiv
>> e-and-exclusionary/ 
>> <https://www.bespacific.com/how-prestige-journals-remain-elite-exclusi
>> ve-and-exclusionary/>
> 
> 
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