[FRIAM] Book publishing advice needed

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Continuing down the open access thread and the ethics of Schwartz' JSTOR theft, libgen, and sci-hub:

Retractions and controversies over coronavirus research show that the process of science is working as it should
https://theconversation.com/retractions-and-controversies-over-coronavirus-research-show-that-the-process-of-science-is-working-as-it-should-140326

>From the article: "The database provided by the tiny company Surgisphere – whose website is no longer accessible – was unavailable during peer review of the paper or to scientists and the public afterwards, preventing anyone from evaluating the data."

The point I made in response to EricS's worry that emphasizing paper consumption over book consumption was that the paper publishing process is more agile and, I argue, can stick more closely to the referent(s). With that agility comes some of the criticisms of Science™ (as well-expressed by Dave recently). To my mind, those criticisms target the wrong thing. They're failures of us to understand that there is no unified scientific method [†] and, along with *openness* comes an understanding that the whole process is messy and intensely social. I think it was Randy Burge who used to repeat a mantra like "Not being right, but getting it right." That journals (as well as newspapers) don't *require* open source and open data at the outset boggles me.

Coincidentally, this popped up in my queue the other day:

Let's talk about why people are moving left....
https://youtu.be/2g0qUxgwHmo

Ed's story about authors seeing very little compensation for their work, Nick's plea for a way to harvest the minds of non-academics, the ethics of Schwartz' theft, are all *old* issues targeting the same problems with late stage capitalism now being targeted by BLM and antifa. Perhaps the incentive and motive systems are the causes; and outcomes like libgen are the symptoms.


[†] I'm currently (slowly, as usual) reading a nice little book called "Ignorance" https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13574594-ignorance that makes this point nicely. I put the book down in disgust when he started yapping about quantum mechanics. Why does everyone always do that even if they admit upfront they don't know what they're talking about? [sigh] Anyway, I got over it and have started again.

On 7/7/20 4:59 AM, Edward Angel wrote:
> I have to negotiate the terms with the university, I can, however, make anything I develop open source. It took a while for universities to agree that that that decision is totally up to the faculty member.
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