Gerard takes on JSTOR, purt'near calls them liars Options

[The Joy]

Somey, it is obvious that Radek is trolling. Can you please do something about that? If I wanted to do with out right liars who are promoting disinformation as the only means to protect their free kulture anarchy, I would go hang out at Foundation-l. Isn't WR supposed to be free of that stuff?

Somey, could you remind us, doesn't Ottava have some kind of "X posts per day" limit, or something?

He used to be on the Horological Egg-Timer (as Moulton called it), but I thought Ottava and Somey reached an accord about that?

[Somey]

Somey, could you remind us, doesn't Ottava have some kind of "X posts per day" limit, or something?

He used to be on the Horological Egg-Timer (as Moulton called it), but I thought Ottava and Somey reached an accord about that?

Well, we did reduce the timer duration to 30 minutes, based on what we considered to be a significant improvement in his general mien, so to speak. But shortly after that he posted a somewhat final-sounding bye-bye message and we didn't hear from him for several months - until just recently, that is.

I should say that this thread is a little hard to follow now, and it has been derailed to some degree - but that's not entirely Ottava's fault, despite his history of thread-derailment. The issue here isn't really whether or not academic journals are "highly" profitable, though to be honest I'm surprised anyone would argue that they are, at least not generally speaking. Moreover, I can't imagine anyone looking at sales/subscriber figures from the last 10-15 years (roughly corresponding with the internet era) and not seeing noticeable declines across the board.

To me, the issue here is the attitude of Wikipedians towards people who are trying to make a living as "knowledge workers" - and by that I mean anybody, at any level. Writers, researchers, editors, publishers, distributors, even the people who run the support machinery to some degree. I just can't see why it isn't more obvious to people that the more extreme attitudes we see from WPers (and Dave Gerard is one of the most extreme WPers of all) are based largely on jealousy, envy, and (as always) narcissism. They don't dislike the idea of getting paid to be smart; they dislike the fact that other people are getting paid, not them.

And if they honestly think they're doing the world a big favor by taking a pro-active stance against academic publishing, they're dangerously deluded, and once again it's no wonder that people accuse them of cultishness because of things like that. So we can only hope that in this case, it's just Dave being Dave, and not something more widespread and (I daresay) sinister.

[SpiderAndWeb]

Most academics I know publish copies of their paper on their website, freely available. Google search for the title of the paper usually turns these up. If there are particular papers not available for free online yet, if you email the corresponding authors they will be delighted to send you a copy, free of charge. There is no need to pay Elsevier or anyone else for access to these papers.

Unless you've already published in an Elsevier journal. You don't retain copyright in that case, and it's technically illegal for you to just publish it youself on your website, in that case. A fair fraction of the money journals make is in providing reprints to authors so they can have something to send by snailmail. No, I don't know if Elsevier has ever prosecuted such a case, however.

Abd is right, in that I have articles published by Elsevier, and preprints of the same articles hosted perfectly legally on my web site. There may be a few extra typos and the formatting is different but the content itself is identical.

[EricBarbour]

So we can only hope that in this case, it's just Dave being Dave, and not something more widespread and (I daresay) sinister.

People have been tortured and killed for far less than what Dave Gerard does routinely. Presumably his
pornsite sysop work makes him think he's a badass, and therefore untouchable by mere mortals.
I bet you they aren't paying him as much as he thinks he's worth, and resentment has had a few
years to build up.

Personally I'm still waiting for him to realize that, if there was ever a real crisis, Jimbo would
cheerfully throw him out of the airplane, and watch him corkscrew into the dirt. Jimbo lies to everyone,
close or far.