The Last Word

[Cancer]

There are times when I pine for the the thread with the People's Rip-Off Republic of New Bunnistan.

[L. Marcus]

... I have no recollection of this thread.

[Cancer]

I think it was among the distilled madness of the "Who is the Treadslayer" thread, where mods were having fun changing its name, the poll in it, locking it and unlocking it again, and so om.

[L. Marcus]

Wasn't it Hermit? And that was a fun thread.

[Bazza]

Yes it was for the most part.

[L. Marcus]

I have slain my fair share of threads.

[Bazza]

Me too. 

[Cancer]

"... but this is not that day!"

[L. Marcus]

Where's the rest of the rousing speech?

[Cancer]

Waiting for when I have time to type it in. I had an errand I had to run.

[L. Marcus]

Knight-errand.

[Cancer]

No, it was a first-thing-in-the-morning errand. Taking the cat to the vet on my way to work.

[L. Marcus]

Poor kitteh. How did it take the visit?

[Cancer]

As it always does. Dismayed.

[L. Marcus]

"Hoo-man! You betrayed me! Again!!"

[Cancer]

Well, since I've been giving her pills (which she hates) nightly for several days, it's hardly new.

[L. Marcus]

Does the cat keep a List?

[Bazza]

 

 

 We are few in number; there are no industrial applications; if it wasn't for the intrinsic coolness of astronomical stuff, we would fewer in number and considered as irrelevant for today's world as, say, Greek philosophers.

 

 

Welcome to the club, here is your ceremonial toga. 

[Bazza]

OK, I finally have time to rant about this here.

 

Executive summary: In my opinion, the profit motive belongs in science publishing about as much as a sex offender belongs in an elementary school.

 

If there is any chance you'll declare tl;dr to anything, don't click this.

I come at this from astronomy. Now that the navigation and timekeeping problems are solved, there is no money in astronomy, unless you go the Carl Sagan/Timothy Ferris/Neil deGrasse Tyson route. We are few in number; there are no industrial applications; if it wasn't for the intrinsic coolness of astronomical stuff, we would fewer in number and considered as irrelevant for today's world as, say, Greek philosophers.

 

Also, more than perhaps any other science, old data is important to us. Observations made decades, centuries, millennia ago are still important, even when made with techniques now laughably crude. No matter how hard you try now, you cannot re-observe a one-time event that happened in 1969, 1885, 1682 and 1607 and 1531, 1572, 1054, or 146-127 BC.

 

(Why those dates?

* Nick Sanduleak did a survey of stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud in the late 1960s, giving positions, brightnesses, spectral types, published in 1969. A ho-hum kind of basic data catalog at the time, one which exploded in importance in late February 1987 when star #202 in his minus 69 degree strip … abbreviated Sk -69° 202 … itself exploded and because the first naked-eye supernova in almost 400 years, and only the second star (after the Sun) to be detected by its neutrino emission. When Sanduleak made his observations, no one could possibly have known that it was going to explode. But what exactly had exploded was a question frantically asked in the first couple of months post-explosion, for in the glare of that blast you could no longer see the faint stuff that had originally been there.

 

* In late August 1885 there appeared a "nova", S Andromedae, in the Great Nebula in Andromeda, which flirted with naked-eye brightness. For decades it was a singular event, because it implied that the spiral nebulae were small, faint things, an implication that was increasingly contradicted for several decades. Then Fritz Zwicky had the idea that there were things much brighter than ordinary novae (which pop off to naked eye brightness in our Galaxy every decade or so). Still a troublesome object, coming as it did right at the beginnings of astrophysics, we deeply wish we had more data from it.

 

* Edmond Halley, working about 1700 with Newton's newly published laws of motion and gravitation, went back through published records of comets, and found that the orbits of two comets seen in 1531, and one comet observed by Kepler in 1607, and another one seen in 1682 were similar; he posited that all these were the same physical object and predicted its return in 1758. He did not live to see it, but it happened, and it is hard to overstate just how important this analysis and prediction of what we now call Halley's Comet was in the history of science.

 

* Contrast the situation of the bright "guest star" that appeared in Taurus on July 4 1054 AD; the Chinese certainly saw it and recorded it; a pictograph was left behind by American Indians; but any observations made by the Europeans of the time have been lost. Charles Messier rediscovered the object (while looking for that predicted 1758 apparition of Halley's) but it took more than a century to connect Messier's Non-Comet Object #1, the Crab Nebula, with the medieval Chinese records; the discovery of the pulsar, the spinning neutron star that is the remnant of the core of the star that exploded, was done by radio telescope in 1968 and optically confirmed in 1969. We'd like to know much more than we do of the supernova's light curve.

 

* Hipparchus himself, working in the second Century BC, compared his observations with those of workers a century earlier, and identified the precession of equinoxes.

... end the history examples.)

 

So … astronomers value old publications perhaps more than any other scientists. That what libraries are for. We support and treasure them, and the dedicated librarians who work in them. And it shouldn't be a surprise that astronomers, not commercial publishers, created one of the first library digital library research tools (Asphysics Data System, in 1992); here's a like to the ADS page itself, though usually I go straight to the Search page.

 

Yes, I am willing to pay a fair price for subscriptions. There are costs involved in that; I have worked in a scientific journal's editorial office so I know first-hand. I'm willing to help pay those. For the journals published by the scientific societies I belong to, I recognize that part of my membership dues support those operations. I am happy to do that. That IMO is among the primary purposes of a scientific society. I pay my annual dues with no small satisfaction so the society can do all of that. The people who work there are colleagues of mine. We are in the boat together.

 

My own work has largely gone into American Astronomical Society journals. They have delayed open access (goes open a year after publication). I have no problem with that. (Those journals went to electronic only distribution as of Jan 1 2016, BTW.) The other major journals (Astronomy & Astrophysics, the European journal, and the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society have similar policies albeit with longer delay before open access.

 

Research grants explicitly include publication costs (yes, in approximately all journals, as an author, you have to agree to pay to get your stuff published; standard procedure). Government agency grants explicitly include money for these. So you the taxpayer are paying this.

 

The data from government-funded facilities generally is freely available after delay … as it should be. For example, the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes has its Data Use Policy here. How long the proprietary data phase lasts varies from mission to mission, but it's not real long. Now, you are sort of on your own in terms of using the data once you have it, but that again is as it should be, and if you are really interested in proper astronomy, you can probably learn how to manipulate the stuff from help you can get fairly easily.

 

But you want to put a dam between the researcher (and general public) and the scientific literature, in order to extract money you have done nothing to earn besides playing dog in the manger? No. Absolutely no. Next you'll be telling the usual old lies about how private industry built the Internet as part of your justification, when all you're doing is co-opting infrastructure others worked to build, so as to bite all the hands from which you've fed. You are a parasite. You are not a scientist, you are a profiteer. You are a corrupt agent of a power whose aims are in direct opposition to those of ideal science.

 

The bad boy (or most prominent bad boy) here is Elsevier, a for-profit publisher (who notably publishes approximately nothing in astronomical disciplines … not enough money is available for us; though they do gouge people who are in radiative energy transfer since the Journal of Quantitative Spectroscopy and Radiative Transfer is theirs, though I haven't needed anything in it since about 1988). They are the ones throwing around the take-down orders and lawsuits, trying to get people to pay twice for ostensibly free-access material, and so on. Not being a librarian or a student of libraries' woes, I know little in specifics, but my hackles go up when I see their imprint.

 

 

What, no mention of Thales? According to tradition, he founded science (what we call science) by using mathematics to give a rational account of an eclipse. So from the very start, astronomy, is the first science -- before physics, chemistry, biology etc.

 

[Cancer]

I was drawing specifically upon cases of vital contributions coming from people using observations made and published by people before them, and for which I could find something like firm dates for both them and the earlier work they drew upon. Nothing against Thales, but I couldn't quickly find a case like that for him.

[L. Marcus]

Clever as a brain pie, that one.

[Bazza]

I was drawing specifically upon cases of vital contributions coming from people using observations made and published by people before them, and for which I could find something like firm dates for both them and the earlier work they drew upon. Nothing against Thales, but I couldn't quickly find a case like that for him.

Totally understood. No worries.

[Bazza]

Is time qualititive? The book in front of me says yes.

[Pariah]

Time is an illusion. Lunchtime, doubly so.

[Bazza]

Lunchtime = time * 2