It really comes down to the following difficult decision: who do you trust more. The last administration or a mid level NSA worker with little to no proof?

Lightbulbs getting out of a pool I guess.

I worked in a bacterial lab as an undergrad, and know that membrane protiens are hard to work with, so no, that doesn't sound easy to me at all. Although, I kill E.coli every time I try to do any cloning, so maybe it's not that tough...

Brand name does factor into it though, while "supported open-access publications" doesn't. And you have to admit at my stage, grad student, brand-name publications are a little more important than at the post-doc or especially professor stage. I'll only have one to three publications total. If one or all of them is in Cell, Development, Nature, ETC, that's worth a lot more than some of the others, which can make a difference in post-doc postitions, right?

A publication on my CV. And when I want to think about situations that aren't right, I rarely get past how much I'm going to get paid for work that hopefully will help cure some diseasess, as opposed to how much a high-priced lawyer will get paid for work that will help corporations get more money. Ending the science publication racket is not on my top ten things that are wrong with public funding.

That is the second best reason to be in biology. The first, of course, is the fame and money.

I have nothing against open access, I think it's a good thing and have run into that too. The solution is to force journals to be open access, not expect researchers to choose against their best interests to support it. I was just saying I don't believe in it so much I'd weaken my CV to support it.

Pathetic? I'm a grad student. If I didn't come off as pathetic, I'd be putting on a good act. In all honesty, my views on open access and whatnot are of little value. I don't get to judge my own CV. When I'm a tenured professor, then I could have some choice in the matter, but right now I'm far from it. Selling my paper short (for a cause I'm pretty apathetic about anyway) would have no effect.

Out of curiosity, anonymous person, what field is your lab in?

If I write a paper, I'm going to try to get it in the best journal I can so it looks better on my resume. Open access does not factor into it. I'm not about to sell myself short and publish in a lower impact journal, and hurt my career, just to make sure everyone can access it free of charge.

That said, springer does have some high impact journals, and there could be other details I'm missing to sweeten the deal. All else being equal though, if faced with a choice between higher value publication and open access, it's not a question, and won't be for many other people.

I said "I shouldn't have to", not "I don't do this already in other media."

I paid for the game, I shouldn't have to also see ads to support the game, no matter how unobtrusive they are.

What? Who wants games to be as "realistic and lifelike as possible?" I want GRAPHICS to be as realistic as possible, the actual content and gameplay can and should take liberties. Example: mirror's edge would be a terrible game if you randomly landed wrong, broke your femur, and had to spend months of real game time doing therapy before you could continue. Rock band would suck if you had to spend hours upon hours practicing, only for the band to break up and the game to be over after one gig. Super mario bros would have sold zero copies if the italian plumbers had to face a clogged toilet rather than saving the princess.

Jesus man, what kind of boring ass games do you play? Games are SUPPOSED to be unrealistic in that they take the boring or annoying (read; ADS) out.

(Note that if you were joking, little too subtle there, and the insightful mod didn't help.)

I know, I'm never going to buy "bad flavored drink" no matter how many jerseys I see it on.

Well thanks, you just gave away the big suprise. The whole movie you think it's a prequel, but then at the end, suprise! it's actually a sequel, the guy just forgot about the events of the first movie.

On the off chance that was serious, researchers can't agree on NAMES of genes and proteins, let alone conspire. If two cancer biologists made a cure-all for cancer, and then agreed to keep it a secret over lunch, by 1 PM both would have independantly started the process of publishing the results, each one claiming they did it by themselves. No researcher is going to pass up the nobel prize, subsequent grants, and fame and fortune that would come with curing cancer, in order to keep the funding going for their peers.

Thanks man! You've just given me ideas for my next three movies, Memento 2, Reservoir Dogs 2, and Slumdog Millionaire 2!

But I would think you could get a person's DNA from a stool sample (although I wouldn't want to.) Your body sheds a very large number of intestinal cells every day. There's more bacteria, but there's still billions of your own cells, many with your DNA still intact.

Bacteria are not as simple as you might think, they carry out some quite complex tasks. Rather than implying they're small because they're simple, I'd say they are small because they're so much more efficient than our own cells.