Comment VEB Robotron KC 85/4 (Score 2) 523
With an amazing 64k RAM. And GDR radio would broadcast software (REM) we could record on tape and then use on the KC 85.
With an amazing 64k RAM. And GDR radio would broadcast software (REM) we could record on tape and then use on the KC 85.
In the past ten years, I've had zero problem paying for my publications in open access journals. If all journals become open access I will hardly notice.
You may be an established scientist with sufficient funding, or working in an institute which provides this funding. There are other experiences; in the past, I have struggled to find a way to pay open access fees and it has prevented me from publishing. Most publishers claim to have policies that allow waivers of open access publications if authors are unable to pay, I found this to be mostly empty promises. After 3 months going around offices at my university to get certified that I really have no funds to pay for the article processing charge, I got a 50% discount -- asking me to still pay over 1000 GBP which I would have had to cover from postdoc salary, because the university had no means (or will) to pay. This did not happen with "predatory" OA publishers but more established OA publishers like PLoS. And it is not only my own experience but shared by colleagues in my field.
I am all in favor of free access to scientific publications, but not a fan of Open Access publishing; instead of a barrier to reading scientific articles, OA puts a barrier on publishing and I find that even worse (no, just putting your article on the arXiv or BioRxiv is not an alternative -- it is important but lacks the added values journals still provide, such as editing, reviewing, and essentially curating collections of papers so I can find them).
There is a move towards paid open access publishing globally, and I think this is mainly a bailout of the publishers and means to protect them against SciHub. The cost of this move is a barrier to publishing, especially for poorer countries, but also for people in countries where there may be sufficient funding but not everybody has access to it. You may be privileged by working in a field or at an institute where you have sufficient funding, or are able to acquire sufficient funds to cover your OA charges; this is great, but not everybody is in your position (I feel myself fortunate to being able to pay OA charges for most of my papers now). (Mandatory) OA will allow publishers to continue to exist and make profits from publicly funded research; with SciHub, everybody could read science without paying ridiculous subscription fees, so business was lost for publishers; but scientists cannot stop publishing, and charging for publication instead of reading will perpetuate the publishers' business model (making money off public research funds). So no, I don't think OA is the solution; it is part of the problem. SciHub was the solution (and yes, it is illegal; there are many ways possible to make this a public service, make it legal, make it a requirement; that should be what scientists lobby for, not OA publishing).
Minesweeper in Windows can be guess-free too: x-y-z-z-y-enter-shift+enter.
The first rule of intelligent tinkering is to save all the parts. -- Paul Erlich