I’m not even sure what he’s talking about. Open access journals are the ones who charge authors to publish.
If you publish in a journal that has closed access, there is generally no fee to publish. If you want your paper to be open access, you can tack on an additional open access fee so that your paper doesn’t end up behind a paywall. The last time I looked - and this was several years ago - the going rate for making your paper open access in a closed access journal was about $2-3k. We always budgeted for publication fees when we were putting together our funding proposals.
The fee structure is similar for open access journals, except that there’s not a choice about paying them. For researchers whose work isn’t grant funded, it generally means they’re paying out of pocket, unless their institution steps in.
I had a paper published in a small but (in its field) prestigious journal, and the editor explained to me that he only charges people who can afford it, and uses those funds to cover the costs of the journal. He explained that he had a paper from a researcher who couldn’t cover the publishing fee, and he let me know that I was helping out the other person, too.
What I don’t understand is how anyone how has gone through academia doesn’t know this.
Of course you can put it anywhere you’d like. Services like arXiv specialize in hosting pre-prints of published papers as well as white papers that only have an institutional association.
The problem is that the job of an academic is to publish. That’s how you build credibility and seniority. For it to count as a “published paper” it needs to have undergone peer review so that the people who want to read/cite the paper at least have the confidence that it’s at least been reviewed by other experts in the field.
There are some “journals” that will publish anything as long as they get their fees. Most academics are wise to that by now, but it can still impress people in business for whom a pub is a pub.
This guy probably lives in his own small world. If you want to publish in PLOS as a researcher from say Turkey or Uzbekistan or any other country where the value of your money is nil, you might easily have to pay your yearly salary or half of your funding to get a single paper published.
If you publish in a journal that has closed access, there is generally no fee to publish.
What field are you in? In the life sciences, there’s normally a fee to publish closed-access and a higher one for open-access. My last paper was open access and costed about 3500, compared to 1500 pay walled.
My background is in theoretical biology, but I was mostly publishing in public health, physics, and computer science journals. We paid for every paper because I feel very strongly about research being made available to everyone, especially in the case of publicly funded work. I just make sure to budget for it.
I had a couple of papers in one of the PLOS journals, which afaik are fee-only pubs.
It’s been about ten years since I’ve had to worry about publishing, as o decided to sell out and join a commercial company, and they’re pretty averse to publishing. My information might be out of date.
I do think the academic publishing industry is atrocious, however, and I have always encouraged people to check on sites like arxiv, the personal web page of the lead author, and as a final attempt contacting the lead author directly. Most journals that I dealt with permit authors to upload preprints to sites like arxiv, and if you do it with your final revision the only difference would be the formatting. Of course, that doesn’t count as a publication for academic purposes, and it doesn’t get around paying fees for the journals that charge them, but it is an avenue for people to make their research more globally available for free. I’m sure you know of that, I’m just mentioning it for students looking for a copy of a paper.
Depends. Many journals in Evolution/Ecology are still free to publish in non-OA. It’s becoming rarer though because many journals are switching to full (paid!) open access.
I am currently trying to publish in the European Journal of Psychology (EJoP), which is Open Access only. The fee is 750€, if I’m not mistaken, and you can apply for fee reduction. I have no idea how lenient/strict they are with that, or how much effort that would be. The department is covering the costs, obviously.
It depends on the journal. I’ve only published in medical related journals, but some journals don’t charge a fee if the article remains closed access. Some journals just have an embargo period, so you may be free to republish to pubmed central or something similar after a year or two. Open access of course always costs money, or more if they do charge a publishing fee. A lot of nih grants have requirements to make it open access within a year, so some publishers at least are just embargoing for a year now.
Just wait until those same weird hairless apes with back issues learn how how to harness a particular mixture of charcoal, brimstone, and poop crystals.
Major natural sources of potassium nitrate were the deposits crystallizing from cave walls and the accumulations of bat guano in caves. Extraction is accomplished by immersing the guano in water for a day, filtering, and harvesting the crystals in the filtered water.
He also had a history of being screwed by people. The guy did a lot of good work, and arguably his attempt at patenting it was instrumental in preventing it from being patented. I don’t think that was his intention, but good came from it.
Remember Venus is a Earth like planet and even relatively close to the habitable zone (depending on your definitions and error bars). Just because it’s a planet like Earth, doesn’t mean it would support life.
I wouldn’t be particularly surprised to find out Venus has life. Complex life, probably not, but something like the life we have around undersea volcanic vents seems more than possible.
I really don’t see how. Yes there is life at undersea volcanic vents on Earth, but they don’t live like in the vent itself. It’s where the temperature gets lower there is life.
As far as I know nothing can survive boiling temperatures for long and Venus has been way above boiling for millions of years. There are extremophiles that survive a little above boiling, but 400+ degrees I really don’t see how.
There is a chance in the atmosphere where there are parts with reasonable temperatures and pressures. But there is also a lot of acids floating around, which is sorta incompatible with life. If some photosynthetic life was present in the atmosphere, floating around and living on sunlight, we would have seen it by now. There would be seasonal blooms, similar to plankton in the oceans on Earth.
It’s cool to think about and I remember reading old sci-fi with Venus as a forest planet, since it’s so like Earth in a lot of ways. But in reality it’s dead dead.
Same for Mars I feel like. We might find indications life once lived there, which would be a huge deal. But as far as actual current life, I think chances are slim to none.
The mean surface temperature of Venus is only 464C.
But, with 93x the atmospheric pressure of earth, water boils at around 300C.
So…what is it that makes it difficult to thrive beyond 100C? Is it strictly the temperature, or is it the properties of water at that temperature? If it’s the latter, I wouldn’t be so surprised.
Also keep in mind that photosynthesis was a genetic accident that just happened to work really, really well, and the ability to process sunlight directly into energy was what allowed microorganisms to move away from thermal vents.
That same genetic accident could play out in a different world. Or a different genetic accident that’s more suited to their environment. Or no genetic accident at all, and life never moves past small, very secluded regions.
It’s the temperature, a lot of chemistry doesn’t work at higher temperatures because everything is too unstable. There is simply too much energy messing things up. This is why having a surface temperature that allows for liquid water to be present is such a good indicator for life. A lot of chemistry for life as we know it works at liquid water temperatures and water does play a big part as well.
The pressure would be less of an issue, there is plenty of life on Earth that thrives at huge pressures.
I’m pretty sure life on Earth evolved at the surface (or even in the atmosphere, it is thought lightning plays a part) and only adapted to use the vents later on. I’m not sure life could get started at those volcanic vents.
The pressure would be less of an issue, there is plenty of life on Earth that thrives at huge pressures.
I think their point was that the pressure “balances out” the temperature - so that enough of these chemistry does remain stable even though the temperature is high. For example - the water remains liquid because of the pressure, so that’s one requirement for life that gets fulfilled.
I mean, isn’t the entire concept of the Fermi paradox that given the universe is so large and old, it seems surprising that we see no signs of aliens anywhere, and therefore some explanation must exist for why we have not? That’s more focused on intelligent life than extraterrestrial life of any sort I suppose, but given it’s even named a paradox in the first place, someone must find it surprising
My argument of that is that we’ve only just started looking in a massive, massive, massive universe. Like, the other day. The big bang theory is less than a hundred years old and we only just discovered cosmic background radiation in 1964
We JUST started looking and we probably have no idea what we are looking for or at.
Also, these earth like planets are a fucking guess, a giant maybe. They make their host star, which we make assumptions of about their size, make a tiny hardly perceptible dip in light and we measure the wavelengts that were filtered out.
The more I learn about how this science is done, the more it all just looks like a big fucking maybe that someone spouts so confidently as fact. Like, the track record for fact is pretty thin in science.
The Fermi Paradox feels like someone sticking their finger in the water at the beach and confidently declaring there are no whales in the ocean because they didn’t touch one.
I guess people tend to look to astronomers for information about space, while the Fermi paradox probably borders more on philosophy than on astronomy. And in a lot of people minds philosophers are not real scientists, unlike astronomers.
In addition to the other helpful replies, one of the major flaws of the Fermi paradox is that it fails to account for the vastness of time. Our failure to observe spacefaring intelligent life is the metaphorical equivalent of a baby born at some point in human history somewhere on earth, opening it’s eyes only long enough to blink, and not observing Cher. It doesn’t mean that Cher doesn’t exist, or even that Cher should be observable given that humanity is so large and old.
My favourite is the idea that it takes time to build out the “infrastructure” that allows for life. Basically, no supernovae, no life, not enough supernovae, extremely low probability of life. Even if that doesn’t put Earth’s life near the leading edge, we may be on the leading edge of technological civilizations.
I’d also point out that we’ve nearly wiped ourselves out several times, and we’re headed towards making our planet incompatible with life. If the conditions for life exist AND life evolves to be sentient AND the sentient life develops communication AND the communication fosters cooperation AND the cooperation leads to technology AND that technology allows the life to survive the vastness of space AND the technology allows for interstellar travel, all that progress could end with a meteor or a virus or a particularly strong solar storm that blows through the magnetosphere and takes our atmosphere with it.
The conditions for sentient technological species exist on earth, and humans are the only ones even close to surviving in space. Dolphins, octopodes, dinosaurs, corvids nothing else is even sharing arbitrary knowledge yet. For that to even happen, we’d probably all need to be dead.
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