BBC Focus Magazine

[Ush]

http://www.doaj.org/doaj?func=home

[M Paul Lloyd]

Useful, thanks Ush.

[Shadowwolf]

Bout time, many don't have nice Uni access to academic journals.

[Ush]

I know and have you seen the price they charge for access, especially the charge per article?

[Shadowwolf]

Quite significant Mr Ush, largely because they see academics as a captive audience and Uni's have big pockets.

[The Jules]

Having just finished a part time degree (yes, I know, thanks, and at my age too), access to lots of journals at home was a right palaver.

I'll check this out, but it might have been rather useful if the journals are any good.

[Flakkarin]

I'm glad at least there's some kind of resources.
We were talking in class about that gap between scientists and the public, all to often filled by the mass media. We decided one of the main problems was the tendency of the media to treat the public like idiots, and dumb the science down so much as to be just wrong. We thought it would be great if we could engage the public with 'real' science, and if they are intrigued, to direct them to the literature. BUT of course, most of the public don't have access to journals. Honestly, it's enough to make me want to give all you guys my username and password, but I don't think my Uni would appreciate that...

[M Paul Lloyd]

No I'm sure they wouldn't Flakkarin.

But you are right, the public get a very distorted view of science, which is an unhealthy situation at best.

[Ush]

I agree that the press dumb things down way too much. It would be better if they just printed press releases from scientific organisations/Universities/scientists rather than have a journalist who knows nothing about the subject write nonsense.

Sometimes if you enter the name of a paper into a search engine you can find the paper uploaded somewhere in one form or another - it crossed my mind that this may be considered theft in the way that downloading music is but I don't actually know for sure.

[Flakkarin]

Quite a lot of the time scientists post their own papers as pdfs online, so I'd say it's not stealing. The other day I sat and downloaded almost the entire literature history of a guy called Alan Robock, who'd posted almost all his work on his own website. It's certainly something I would do (when i finally get published )
But a journal napster would be amusing eh... scientists across the world getting busted for illegally downloading Nature or Science

[M Paul Lloyd]

Quite a lot of the time scientists post their own papers as pdfs online,

It's a shame climate scientists are not all so magnanimous.

[Flakkarin]

I refer you back to Alan Robock
http://climate.envsci.rutgers.edu/robock/robock_imppapers.html

Or even the eminent Stephen Schneider:
http://stephenschneider.stanford.edu/Publications/PubFrameset.html?http://stephenschneider.stanford.edu/Publications/Publications.html

And Ray 'hockey stick' Bradley himself:
http://www.geo.umass.edu/climate/publications.html#RaymondBradley
If you scroll around that page, it seems to have all of the team at the Climate System Research Center, a resource indeed!

Well, as this little exercise shows, if you know who you're looking for, quite often they do in fact share their information!

[EzBloke]

Awesome find!

I'm just going inside... I may be gone, some time...

[M Paul Lloyd]

Strange I thought climate scientists had trouble communicating with 'common' folk.

I'm thinking Hadley centre here.

[M Paul Lloyd]

Finally, I have retrieved this most useful thread and made it a sticky. The one thing that bugs me about the internet is that reference material is either so simple as to be best suited to my eleven year old's homework or you have to pay to get the full text with the going rate being around £35 a journal at this point in time.

I know Wikipedia is supposed to be so wonderful and all that and seems to be the default result in any Google search these days but my daughters school makes a point of not allowing Wiki as a source of reference for homework, and if it's not good enough for middle school then it's not good enough for me.

[Ush]

The charge is way over the top! For one paper it can cost as much as a book. What a rip off.

[M Paul Lloyd]

I could understand a nominal charge of say £5 a time (they would probably actually make more money that way) but the sort of charges they impose is a bit like saying 'go away you utterly insignificant person' which is hardly right or fair in my book.