{"id":70,"date":"2009-01-24T17:57:31","date_gmt":"2009-01-24T22:57:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/littlesvr.ca\/grumble\/?p=70"},"modified":"2012-12-05T00:54:28","modified_gmt":"2012-12-05T05:54:28","slug":"bloody-scholarly-papers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/littlesvr.ca\/grumble\/2009\/01\/24\/bloody-scholarly-papers\/","title":{"rendered":"Bloody scholarly papers"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m gettng a master&#8217;s degree. And in the current course I have one of those professors who act like something&#8217;s up their ass whenever someone cites a work that&#8217;s not &#8216;academic&#8217;.<\/p>\n<p>For the assignment this week I actually needed to get my hands on some academic papers, because the topic is so uninteresting noone else would bother to write about it. What a nightmare! I&#8217;ll tell you why, here&#8217;s the process I have to go through to get to only one of these papers:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Find the paper I need via google, because the library search engine is crap.<\/li>\n<li>Paste the title into the library search engine.<\/li>\n<li>Remember to check &#8216;Computing&#8217;, which is down below the search button, or else the following step will need to be repeated.<\/li>\n<li>Watch the MetaLib &#8216;Quick Search&#8217; search the databases for anywhere between 1 and 3 minutes (I&#8217;m not kidding).<\/li>\n<li>Click on the title of the paper in the search results (assuming the search didn&#8217;t crash, which it does sometimes).<\/li>\n<li>Scan the following page for 20 seconds looking for anything that remotely sounds like &#8216;download&#8217; or &#8216;view&#8217;. For this particular paper it turned out to be called &#8220;Resource:&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>Click that link. A popup window opens with MetaLib doing something unspecified for a few seconds. This window is 1\/4 of the screen in size and has no navigation buttons.<\/li>\n<li>Read the error message in bold: &#8220;An error has been encountered. Invalid Parameters&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>Click on &#8216;Quick Search&#8217; (in the window with the error). Some long number is pre-filled into the search bar.<\/li>\n<li>Select &#8216;Technology&#8217; in the subject area drop-down and click &#8216;search&#8217;.<\/li>\n<li>The thing comes back with a link to the paper you were looking for. Click that.<\/li>\n<li>Scan the following page for 20 seconds looking for anything that remotely sounds like &#8216;download&#8217; or &#8216;view&#8217;. For this particular paper it took a minute.<\/li>\n<li>Click the &#8216;Find it @ Liverpool&#8217; link desguised as a title banner.<\/li>\n<li>It says &#8216; Full text available via ACM Digital Library&#8217;, whatever &#8211; click go.<\/li>\n<li>A popup window opens, this one 1\/6th of the size of my screen. This is the same page I found via google &#8211; except now I have the permission to download the paper. Click on the pdf link.<\/li>\n<li>PDF downloads.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>You see all of the above? That&#8217;s for <strong>ONE PAPER!<\/strong> It may not even be of any use in my research, I may need to repeat all of the above process 20, 30 times. What sort of a lazy ass moron thinks that I have time for this? In the time it took me to open the academic paper I would have learned everything they found reading the Wikipedia, forums, blogs, wikis, the MSDN, and a hundred other online resources designed to be accessed easier rather than harder. It turns out that on this topic there are no resources except academic, but man am I pissed.<\/p>\n<p>What&#8217;s with this pay to access thing anyway? I&#8217;d like to know how much money the publishers make charging for access to 15 year old papers. I understand that the peer review process is expensive, that&#8217;s fine. Have the papers in the last year, two, five locked up. But for fuck&#8217;s sake put anything more than 10 years old in the public domain. If you don&#8217;t you will lose your business as people growing up today feel as I do. I will <em>never<\/em> look for an academic paper when I have a choice. And that means that 10 years from now these publishers and librarians will be out of a job, because of their belief that they are irreplaceable.<\/p>\n<p>Morons!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m gettng a master&#8217;s degree. And in the current course I have one of those professors who act like something&#8217;s up their ass whenever someone cites a work that&#8217;s not &#8216;academic&#8217;. For the assignment this week I actually needed to get my hands on some academic papers, because the topic is so uninteresting noone else &hellip; <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"entry","1":"post","2":"publish","3":"author-andrew","4":"post-70","6":"format-standard","7":"category-uncategorized"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/littlesvr.ca\/grumble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/littlesvr.ca\/grumble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/littlesvr.ca\/grumble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/littlesvr.ca\/grumble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/littlesvr.ca\/grumble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=70"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/littlesvr.ca\/grumble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":630,"href":"http:\/\/littlesvr.ca\/grumble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70\/revisions\/630"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/littlesvr.ca\/grumble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=70"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/littlesvr.ca\/grumble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=70"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/littlesvr.ca\/grumble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=70"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}