laderach

Sometimes you don't need to redo everything from scratch to change things.

There are a number of problems in scientific publishing. Two big ones are:

1) Distribution hurdles and paywalls imposed by rent seeking journals - who knows how much this has prevented innovation and scientific advancement in the last 20 years

2) Easily replicating experiments / easily verifying accuracy and significance of results - this is related to for instance making data used in research more easily accessible and making it easier to spot p-value hacking

Fixing these might not require a completely new format for papers. Or it could. I can envision solutions both ways.

I really like what the folks from Fermat's Library have been doing. They have been developing tools that are actually useful at the present time and push us in the right direction. I use their arXiv chrome extension https://fermatslibrary.com/librarian all the time for extracting references and bibtex. At the same time they are playing with entirely new concepts - they just posted a neat article on medium about a new unit for academic publishing https://medium.com/@fermatslibrary/a-new-unit-of-academic-pu...

Thank you for sharing your story! I am going to google Martin Gardner's Mathematical Games later this afternoon!

My son is now 4 years old, he has been showing a great deal of interest in playing with numbers and puzzles, so I have been thinking quite a bit about this lately.

The other day I ran across an issue of Scientific American from the late 70s (http://flowcytometry.sysbio.med.harvard.edu/files/flowcytome...) and I was super impressed by the quality and educational value of the content. Much superior to its current version. They have a ton of super interesting "mini" papers about all sorts of topics. In that issue alone I learned about:

- The metabolism of alcohol

- The meteorology of Jupiter

- Simpson's paradox

Take a look at it. I think you might be impressed too.

The other site I have fallen in love with recently is Fermat's Library (https://fermatslibrary.com). They essentially publish an annotated paper every week (usually physics, cs, math). Reading their papers is now a part of my weekly routine.

This is incredibly important. If you dig deep into why LinkedIn is behaving the way it is, it is definitely not an attempt into protecting users' privacy. It's all about maintaining and expanding the ways it can monetize the data that users provide.

This is the type of thing that we risk loosing as the internet matures and internet companies with vested interests gain more power. Setting this type of precedents will absolutely curtail innovation and freedom in the future. Think about it, would Google have been created in an environment that is overwhelmingly siloed and filled with red tape?

I see parallels to the net neutrality discussion in this.