[finfet1]

Totally agree. I have gone through academia and am now in industry; the other day I wanted to read and browse basic papers in IEEE Explore for basic knowledge on new topics. Since I am no longer a student, I am willing to pay money - as much as hundreds to get unlimited access. Instead, for hundreds, IEEE explore offers a measly ("generous") 25 downloads a month or some such non-sense It just seemed so miserly of them. We researchers had formerly given them pretty much free research to publish, and they turn their back on even legitimate paid avenues for us to get the papers. We are willing to pay; but where is the option?

Anyone that has gone through research and academia knows that you often need to browse many papers to even find the ones worth reading. 25 paper cap includes browsing PDFs; you will easily hit that cap in a single day simply through browsing.

IEEE and IEEE Explore can go something themselves. This is coming from a published IEEE author and academic researcher.

[hanklazard]

"Anyone that has gone through research and academia knows that you often need to browse many papers to even find the ones worth reading."

Exactly. And without the monthly subscription plan (something I wasn't even aware of until this comment thread), the going rate seems to be around $30 per paper--rent-seeking to the point of highway robbery. One thing that these publishing companies could have done long ago was allow some sort of "free preview" of the full text or "full refund within 10 min" option to help deal with this problem. I have no idea how this would be done technically to prevent "pirating" but, as it is, the pay-per-paper system is completely disconnected from the way researchers browse papers.

[tzs]

Have you taken a look at deepdyve.com? $40/month ($30/month if bought as an annual subscription) for unlimited online access to a ton of journals, including a bazillion from IEEE: https://www.deepdyve.com/browse/publishers/ieee

If you create an account but do not subscribe, you can view all the papers but only for 5 minutes each. You can then subscribe to read the ones you need more of, or purchase access to 5 papers for $20.

The above is for online reading. If you need PDFs, you can purchase those but they are not cheap. They are usually what the publisher charges on the publisher's site less a 20% discount.

[Alphasite_]

I have no doubt other universities offer this, but see if you can join a Universities library, for access to the papers?

[donlzx]

After the IEEE $25 monthly service came out, I subscribed for three years until finally canceled it. Honestly most of the papers I downloaded were junks, the only reason I download them was to verify the available references.

The paper quality declination plus publication quantity inflation are the main reasons in this "Sci-Hub" crisis.

[chris_wot]

This sounds like an increasingly commented on issue: there are now hundreds and hundreds of specialty journals, but quality is patchy. In fact, I think we may be seeing inherent problems coming to the fore now that journals are more focussed on profits: often there is publication bias towards certain topics; in other cases the bias is towards positive results and breakthroughs, with a lack of enthusiasm for publishing retractions or establishing reproducibility.

One thing that always sticks in my craw is that the raw data is very rarely published for analysis. Many may disagree, but I think that by not publishing the raw data for experiments the temptation to commit academic fraud is very high.

I often wonder about some of the more recent scandals whether it might have been picked up a lot faster had the data been more readily available.

I also have noticed that many journals don't say who the reviewers are after publication. For instance, I was looking at body pyschotherapy the other day and came across something called biodynamic analysis, which appears to be a widely held and well respected view within the subdiscipline. I was amazed to discover that something called "grounding" was a serious concept that underpins this analysis, so I looked at the Wikipedia references and discovered that there was at least one journal citation to The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine. The article seems to be attempting to make a link between bloody viscosity and electrical grounding of humans to the earth! [1]

Now there is another article that shows there is virtually no impact on the body from the same journal, so I started to wonder how this passed peer review. The answer is - I have no way of knowing as they don't make it clear what their review policies and procedures are, and they appear to charge authors to publish work.

In other words - it's pseudoscience dressed up in credibility. And it is making a serious impact in the world of psychology!

1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3576907/

[rspeer]

I have found recently that reviewers in natural language processing, in aggregate, place negative value on reproducibility.

Perhaps 1 out of 3 reviewers gets it, another is bored by the fiddly and detailed methods section, and the third was subconsciously hoping for a "brilliant", mystifying secret sauce. Oh, that's all you did? he asks. I could have done that.

Of course you could have done it, I just told you how and pointed you to the data. I also compiled that data, and you won't even let me tell you that because of blind review.

[kefka]

Wow.

I'm an occultist. One of the first regimens I did so to learn occultism was grounding and centering. It's very much an esoteric skill, and not something to be cited in a paper... unless it was being discussed under a 'microscope'.

I would enjoy in using fMRI or other diagnostic tools to see what physiologically happens when I do those things. But I have no qualms; that shouldn't be in any academic paper until my recommendation of measuring it is done.

[maaku]

> I would enjoy in using fMRI or other diagnostic tools to see what physiologically happens when I do those things. But I have no qualms; that shouldn't be in any academic paper until my recommendation of measuring it is done.

That's not how science works...

[kefka]

Oh, so researching an interesting phenomenon, that is already cited in journals is somehow "not science"? I'd be careful about letting your own biases affect you negatively.

Simply put, there may or may be nothing there. With diagnostic methods and feedback from the person, we can start to determine if there is a measurable effect. If there's something there, we research further. If not, we cite it as proof "no noticeable effect". This also goes to show that we (academic community) should be much more accepting of papers showing "No Effect", rather than only positive papers. Knowing the landmines that others went down is just as valuable as what works.

But in actuality, I was also giving on-topic discussion about where those phenomena are discussed at length: in studies on occultism. That's just a factual statement with no value proposition. Whomever is more interested can do their own research, with this topic in mind.

[chris_wot]

What did you mean by "that shouldn't be in any academic paper until my recommendation of measuring it is done"? I think that might be the sticking point.

[ap22213]

Did you really have to give the guy such a dick response?

[3pt14159]

If you live in a city with a University, like Toronto, check out getting a library card to their library system. It costs me $300 / year and it's unlimited research papers. The only downside is that it is retrievable in person only, so you kinda need to be either close to the University or keep a list of papers you need before you make the trek out.

[maaku]

You are paying $300/year for access to information that was given to the world freely, and sacrificing your time and effort to get it? Do you see the problem here?

[umanwizard]

He didn't claim there wasn't a problem, just gave practical advice for making the most of the unfair situation

[aab0]

Even more practical advice: 'use Libgen'.

[maaku]

I somehow misread that as 'use Lojban' and was momentarily both confused and delighted :\

[chris_wot]

It's unfortunate that you are now clear-headed and disappointed.

[apricot]

Indeed,"Lojban" and "practical" in the same sentence is not something you see every day.

[throwawaybookst]

And also all the other resources the university library offers. Especially in summer months, uni libraries are amazing and massively under-used resources. Working/learning is a public library is usually a drag, but uni libraries are awesome.

I used to live a couple blocks from a uni library, and I practically lived there. In the summers I drove straight there from work, got lost in the stacks learning about random things, and only left when it closed.

Fortunately that library was completely free to the public, but if it weren't I would have happily paid $100/mo during the summer months for access (Probably saved that much just in utilities anyways.)

[qiqing]

What if your city doesn't have that?

[jcoffland]

The IEEE is such BS. I was a member but left because of all the SPAM. They continued to SPAM me for years after I left.

[jrjr]

IEEE is not for Engineers, it's a Management Overlay.

[aswanson]

I recognized what a scam IEEE was my first year of grad school. So many fees, sub-society fees, transaction fees...something themselves indeed. Many times over.