Wednesday, June 30, 2010

Nature journals too expensive

I get the updates on journal by nature. But when you click the link to read the article you are asked to purchase the article (see this article on Lidar :Mapping the world in 3D ). The article costs $38 USD! So I wrote to Nature telling them this is an order of magnitude off in pricing! What do you think? Should science be easier to access.. is Nature shooting themselves in the foot?

my comment to nature photonics:

Why is the price for an article $30 USD?!! When I can buy magazines for $5, music albums for $10, books for $20, iPhone apps for $1-10, why would anyone pay $30 for a 1-2 page article! I know that the majority of your subscribers are universities, but not all of them. You are missing a huge group of scientists who would probably pay to read these articles, but not the price your asking!
May I suggest an iPhone/iPad / kindle app that lets me download papers and read them. You know that to any given scientist maybe 1/4 of the articles in any journal are of interest to them, so buying every journal is not as valuable as you may think.

What many do is get colleges to get the pdf for them, scan copies, or most of the time we go to an open access journal. I've never read Nature Photonics (aside from copies sent to me by friends) but use Optics Express all the time.
I think your journal is good, but inaccessible.. which mean not relevant. Please change this. Scientists are not payed that well, and personal copies are nice to have. Remember that we are blog readers.. so browsing and picking useful work is what we do, but with these costly journals there is no point.

Cheers

Rodger

Monday, June 21, 2010

Evolution has no forsight

A video of the dissection of a giraffe showing notable the laryngeal nerve:

Wednesday, June 09, 2010

Laser tracking

This is a really intersting combination of laser light and sound. I'm not sure how it is done, but I assume it is a combination of camera, laser with moveable mirror, and sound generation based on the deflection of the beam.