How Does Physics in the 21st Century Address Its Sociopolitical Challenges?

[juanREMOVE@canonicalscience.com]

This new report is ready to be downloaded (in pdf format) from the
canonicalscience site.

It is a /perspective/ of 16 pages long that deals with some problems of
physics. It extends a number of other works published in /Nature/ and /
Physics Today/ by other authors.

This is the abstract:

(\abstract
This report presents a nonidealized vision of 21st century science. It
handles some social, political, and economic problems that affect the
heart of scientific endeavour and are carrying important consequences
for scientists and the rest of society.

The problems analyzed are the current tendency to limit the size of
scholarly communications, the funding of research, the rates and page
charges of journals, the wars for the intellectual property of the data
and results of research, and the replacement of impartial reviewing by
anonymous censorship. The scope includes an economic analysis of PLoS'
finances, the wars APS versus Wikipedia and ACS versus NIH, and a list
of thirty four Nobel Laureates whose awarded work was rejected by peer
review.

Several suggestions from Harry Morrow Brown, Lee Smolin, Linda Cooper,
and the present author for solving the problems are included in the
report. The work finishes with a brief section on the reasons to be
optimists about the future of science.
)

Comments ans corrections are welcomed.

NEWS LINK:

http://www.canonicalscience.org/en/publicationzone/
canonicalsciencetoday/20081113.html

Also accesible from index,

--
http://www.canonicalscience.org/

 

[Ian Parker]

On 26 Nov, 17:43, juanREM...@canonicalscience.com wrote:
> This new report is ready to be downloaded (in pdf format) from the
> canonicalscience site.
>[/color]

[[Mod. note -- Excess quoted text excised by moderator. -- jt]]

>  The problems analyzed are the current tendency to limit the size of
>  scholarly communications, the funding of research, the rates and page
>  charges of journals, the wars for the intellectual property of the data
>  and results of research, and the replacement of impartial reviewing by
>  anonymous censorship. The scope includes an economic analysis of PLoS'
>  finances, the wars APS versus Wikipedia and ACS versus NIH, and a list
>   of thirty four Nobel Laureates whose awarded work was rejected by peer
>  review.[/color]

[[Mod. note -- Excess quoted text excised by moderator. -- jt]]

My main bugbear is the cost of access of scientific publications. I am
now retired but I like to keep abreast of scientific developments.
Paying the exorbitant sums demanded is out of the question for me.
There does indeed seem to be little justification.

I suppose you get what you can. I can't help feeling that the money is
being circulated. Universities get suported by the government,
industry etc. A proportion of the money allocated goes on supporting
publications. If this was supplied directly and the publication (in
electronic form) were free, you would not in fact be spending any more
money than you are now. In fact you might well be spending less.

 

[Knecht]

On Nov 27, 10:39 am, Ian Parker <ianpark...@gmail.com> wrote:

>
> My main bugbear is the cost of access of scientific publications. I am
> now retired but I like to keep abreast of scientific developments.
> Paying the exorbitant sums demanded is out of the question for me.
> There does indeed seem to be little justification.
>
> I suppose you get what you can. I can't help feeling that the money is
> being circulated. Universities get suported by the government,
> industry etc. A proportion of the money allocated goes on supporting
> publications. If this was supplied directly and the publication (in
> electronic form) were free, you would not in fact be spending any more
> money than you are now. In fact you might well be spending less.[/color]

The majority of new papers in physics/math are available for free at
the arxiv.org preprint site. It has useful search tools too. You also
get to see a wider variety of papers than the smaller number that
survive the peer review gauntlet.

Yours in science,
Knecht
www.amherst.edu/~rloldershaw