| This is fundamentally one of the many disastrous outcomes of scientific publishing being controlled by greedy conglomerates. For the uninitiated: If you want to publish a scientific paper today, you basically sign up to sign over the rights to any publisher that's interested (please someone publish me). That publisher will then review that paper in a more often than not mostly undisclosed process and publish that paper. Everyone knows that to be a high-regarded publisher one must have a very own typographic formatting: Unreadable font, weird multi column layout to prevent accessibility and tables disregarding standards are a good start. Afterwards, the paper gets published on the publisher website, which again follows as little agreed upon standard as possible. Data is of course excluded, study itself is in PDF. Also put up a fat paywall, don't want those pesky poor people be scientifically literate. Give a few cents of your $70 fee to the authors, it is not an unethical business you're doing here! THIS is the systemic error people seem to be so happy to ignore because they're neck deep in social science not being real science memes. This prevents interesting new startups for fact-checking or meta analysis, which are e.g. happening in journalism because that field has a lot of the things science is sadly lacking. This creates a drift between extremely rich and rather poor countries/unis/humans in scientific ability. This generates a tar pit for scientific process. This wastes billions in funds because of people unaware of each other doing redundant studies (and not referencing/refuting/supporting each other in the process neither, of course) because they are literally better search engines to find Harry Potter fan fiction than there are for finding studies. And finally, this of course allows anything from honest statistical mistakes to snake oil sellers to slip through and doing generations worth of damage, because correcting, fact checking, re-researching, comparing, meta research, anything is slowed to a crawl. So please stop embracing scientific elitism and gatekeeping for this is exactly what brought us here in first place... |