012220c

always some reason
the magazine is late
ah, but next time!

112219b

As I was writing
The day's first poem
I thought "Damn, this is good,"
So I kept it for myself,
To send someplace fancy,
Not just stick it here.
So, sad to say,
This is what you get,
Something from the cut-out bin,
Sorry.

But you may see the other sometime,
Some place,
Shining like the sun.

012219

taking the world
by storm one book sale a month
me in the bargain bin

042018d

You know when you write something, and the viewpoint character is bad, evil, whatever, and you wonder how many people who read it will think it's you. But you submit it for publication anyway.

What The Actual Fudge

Scientific information wants to be free


Academia.edu is a website where scientists can upload copies of their scientific papers to be downloaded for free by other people who want to know about their research. ResearchGate is another such website. The reason for existence of both of these sites is that scientific journals are very, very expensive and many important and skilled researchers don't have access to the world's knowledge*. This is bad for everyone. Now, academia.edu has started charging for advanced searches of their database. This pretty much eliminates their reason to exist. I had already switched over to ResearchGate, because I found it easier to use. I urge any working scientist to do the same now if you haven't already.


*Scientific journals are important and they need money to exist. However, journals published by universities and by professional scientific societies include much of the world's most important information, and they are relatively inexpensive. By contrast, journals published by private publishers like Springer-Verlag, and Elsevier, also contain important information, but they are an order of magnitude more expensive. Further, new, online journals, like Palaeontologia Electronica and PLOS 1, are free to read. They are becoming more and more important, and soon they will probably dominate all of those scientific fields that require large amounts of visual or animated media to convey the information that researchers produce. I call on all scientists to patronize publications that do not victimize libraries and researchers by charging an arm and a leg for information that should never be that expensive.