Comments on: gaming the system

By: Amanda

Amanda — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 23:58:57 +0000

Hi. Hope you’re doing well. Found your monkey a while back, thought I’d Google you and say hello, and what do you know… it’s at least still that useful. Take care,

Amanda

By: Boghog

Boghog — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 13:10:56 +0000

Another thing that bugs me with google these days is sites that index usenet and mailinglists. Not that those sites are bad by themselfes, it’s that so many are doing it… sometimes I’ll google for something and find that 80% of hits are just the same usenet or mailinglist thread on dozens of different indexing sites.

By: Michael Gratton

Michael Gratton — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 06:00:03 +0000

I totally agree with you about Google losing some of it’s fu and especially about the situation with academic journals – I ran into this problem last night. I don’t think the two are related, however.

It seems like it’s impossible to get unpaid access unless you join the right societies (ACM, IEEE, etc) or are luckily enough to be a student who can access them for free via various library portals.

Happily, I am both a student and in the IEEE so I managed to get copies of the papers, but for everyone else it sucks. I don’t see what Google can do about that, however.

/Mike

By: janne

janne — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 04:09:53 +0000

“I wonder how much of that the author gets, if he’s still alive.”

None. The authors of papers in academic journals never receive any money; frequently the author (or their lab) is paying a per-page charge for the privilege of publishing in the journal. The reviewers likewise work for free, receiving nothing for their work. Journals also frequently use “guest editors” for a themed issue; that’s again a researcher, doing it for free (and for a bullet point in their CV). Academic journals are making money hand over fist.

Fortunately, there’s ways around it of you’re looking for a paper. Search for keywords in the title and the first author’s last name, plus “pdf”, and chances are you’ll find a publicly accessible version. Or email one of the authors asking nicely for a copy; they’re most likely happy to oblige (we’re usually just happy anybody at all is interested in our work). Or ask a friend or acquaintance with academic online library access to download the paper if it’s important enough.