I would like some feedback on a change I am considering in my use of some phrases.
I propose that journal articles be called “privately circulated manuscripts” and that “published articles” should be reserved for ones that be downloaded from the internet without subscription. A more mild version would be to adopt the term “public article” and just stop using “published article.”
I think that if you do this and few others do, the main result will be to confuse your readers or hearers—and of those who are confused, when you’ve explained I fear that a good fraction of those who didn’t already agree with you will pigeonhole you as a crank.
Which is a pity, because it would be good for far more published work to be universally accessible than presently is.
A possibly-better approach along similar lines would be to find some term that accurately but unflatteringly describes journals that are only accessible for pay (e.g., “restricted-access”) and use that when describing things published on such terms. That way you aren’t redefining anything, you aren’t saying anything incorrect, you’re just drawing attention to a real thing you find regrettable. You might or might not want a corresponding flattering term for the other side (e.g. “publicly accessible” or something). “There are three things worth reading on this topic. There’s a book by Smith, a restricted-access journal article by Jones, and a publicly-accessible paper by Black.”
You don’t think “privately circulated manuscript” is 100% accurate?
I think it’s pretty clear to say “a privately circulated article by Jones and a published paper by Black,” at least as long as I provide links.
The ambiguity I’m concerned about is where my comment is very short; the typical situation is providing the public version to someone who cited the private version.
“Privately circulated” implies something that’s only available to a very small group and not widely available. This might be a fair characterization in the case of some very obscure journals, but we might reasonably expect that most of the universities in the world would have subscriptions to journals such as Nature. According to Wolfram Alpha, there are 160 million students in post-secondary education in the world, not including faculty or people at other places that might have an institutional subscription.
Even taking into account the fact that not all of “post-secondary education” includes universities but probably also includes more vocational institutions that likely don’t subscribe to scientific journals, we can probably expect the amount of people who have access to reasonably non-niche journals to be in the millions. That doesn’t really fit my understanding of “privately circulated”.
Would you consider Harry Potter not to have been published because it is not being given away for free? Why should “published articles” be defined differently from “published books”?
Everyone applies “published” differently to books and articles. In fact, most people use “published article” to mean “peer-reviewed article,” but even ignoring that there are pretty big differences.
Why did you choose to make this comment here, rather than in response to my original comment?
You don’t think “privately circulated manuscript” is 100% accurate?
No, I read “privately circulated” as distributed to a limited and mostly closed circle. If anyone with a few bucks can buy the paper, I wouldn’t call it “privately circulated”.
as always a phrase being technically 100 percent correct has a lot less to do with whether it’s understood as intended than you might think. a privately circulated manuscript implies the protocols of the elders of zion to me.
Wouldn’t it be more practical to simply adopt a personal rule of jailbreaking (if necessary) any paper that you cite? I know this can be a lot of work since I do just this, but it does get easier as you develop the search skills and is much more useful to other people than an idiosyncratic personal vocabulary.
I think there have been past threads on this. The short story is Google Scholar, Google, your local university library, LW’s research help page, /r/Scholar, and the Wikipedia Resource Request page.
I wonder if “pirating” papers has any real chance of adverse repercussions.
I have 678 PDFs on gwern.net alone, almost all pirated, and perhaps another 200 scattered among my various Dropboxes. These have been building up since 2009. Assuming linear growth, that’s something like 1,317 paper-years (((678+200)/2)*3) without any warning or legal trouble so far. By Laplace, that suggests a risk of trouble per paper-year of 0.076% (((1+0)/(1317+2)) * 100). So, pretty small.
There is no dichotomy. Word choice is largely independent of action. You set a good example, but you cite very few papers compared to your readers. Word choice to nudge your readers might have a larger effect. Do your readers even notice your example?
My question is how to get people to link to public versions, not how to get them to jailbreak. I think that when I offer them a public link it is a good opportunity to shame them. If I call it an “ungated” link, that makes it sound abnormal, a nice extra, but not the default. An issue not addressed by my proposal is how to tell people that google scholar exists. Maybe I should not provide direct links, but google scholar links. Not search links, but cluster links (“all 17 versions”), which might also be more stable than direct links.
I don’t know. I know they often praise my articles for being well-cited, but I don’t know if they would say the same thing were every citation a mere link to Pubmed.
My question is how to get people to link to public versions, not how to get them to jailbreak. I think that when I offer them a public link it is a good opportunity to shame them. If I call it an “ungated” link, that makes it sound abnormal, a nice extra, but not the default
If you just want to shame them, then there’s much more comprehensible choice of terms. For example, ‘useful’ or ‘usable’. “Here is a usable copy”—implying their default was useless.
Universities have a lot subsriptions so that their students can access journal articles for free, so “privately circulated” perhaps isn’t as accurate as you’d like to think. Journals can also be accessed from libraries.
That you are the type of person who thinks that all research should be freely available and charging for access to scientific journals is morally wrong. (You likely also prefer Linux over Windows because MS is evil, but put up with Apple because it is cool.)
I would like some feedback on a change I am considering in my use of some phrases.
I propose that journal articles be called “privately circulated manuscripts” and that “published articles” should be reserved for ones that be downloaded from the internet without subscription. A more mild version would be to adopt the term “public article” and just stop using “published article.”
I think that if you do this and few others do, the main result will be to confuse your readers or hearers—and of those who are confused, when you’ve explained I fear that a good fraction of those who didn’t already agree with you will pigeonhole you as a crank.
Which is a pity, because it would be good for far more published work to be universally accessible than presently is.
A possibly-better approach along similar lines would be to find some term that accurately but unflatteringly describes journals that are only accessible for pay (e.g., “restricted-access”) and use that when describing things published on such terms. That way you aren’t redefining anything, you aren’t saying anything incorrect, you’re just drawing attention to a real thing you find regrettable. You might or might not want a corresponding flattering term for the other side (e.g. “publicly accessible” or something). “There are three things worth reading on this topic. There’s a book by Smith, a restricted-access journal article by Jones, and a publicly-accessible paper by Black.”
You don’t think “privately circulated manuscript” is 100% accurate?
I think it’s pretty clear to say “a privately circulated article by Jones and a published paper by Black,” at least as long as I provide links. The ambiguity I’m concerned about is where my comment is very short; the typical situation is providing the public version to someone who cited the private version.
“Privately circulated” implies something that’s only available to a very small group and not widely available. This might be a fair characterization in the case of some very obscure journals, but we might reasonably expect that most of the universities in the world would have subscriptions to journals such as Nature. According to Wolfram Alpha, there are 160 million students in post-secondary education in the world, not including faculty or people at other places that might have an institutional subscription.
Even taking into account the fact that not all of “post-secondary education” includes universities but probably also includes more vocational institutions that likely don’t subscribe to scientific journals, we can probably expect the amount of people who have access to reasonably non-niche journals to be in the millions. That doesn’t really fit my understanding of “privately circulated”.
Would you consider Harry Potter not to have been published because it is not being given away for free? Why should “published articles” be defined differently from “published books”?
Everyone applies “published” differently to books and articles. In fact, most people use “published article” to mean “peer-reviewed article,” but even ignoring that there are pretty big differences.
Why did you choose to make this comment here, rather than in response to my original comment?
Like what?
No, I read “privately circulated” as distributed to a limited and mostly closed circle. If anyone with a few bucks can buy the paper, I wouldn’t call it “privately circulated”.
Exactly.
A word is just a label for an empirical cluster. It’s misleading to talk about “accurate” as though there were a binary definition.
The “manuscript” part certainly isn’t, since these things are generally typeset.
I choose libel.
as always a phrase being technically 100 percent correct has a lot less to do with whether it’s understood as intended than you might think. a privately circulated manuscript implies the protocols of the elders of zion to me.
gjm chose the word “accurate.”
Wouldn’t it be more practical to simply adopt a personal rule of jailbreaking (if necessary) any paper that you cite? I know this can be a lot of work since I do just this, but it does get easier as you develop the search skills and is much more useful to other people than an idiosyncratic personal vocabulary.
Any how-to-advice on jailbreaking? Do you just mean using subscriptions at your disposal?
I wonder if “pirating” papers has any real chance of adverse repercussions.
I think there have been past threads on this. The short story is Google Scholar, Google, your local university library, LW’s research help page, /r/Scholar, and the Wikipedia Resource Request page.
I have 678 PDFs on gwern.net alone, almost all pirated, and perhaps another 200 scattered among my various Dropboxes. These have been building up since 2009. Assuming linear growth, that’s something like 1,317 paper-years (
((678+200)/2)*3) without any warning or legal trouble so far. By Laplace, that suggests a risk of trouble per paper-year of 0.076% (((1+0)/(1317+2)) * 100). So, pretty small.There is no dichotomy. Word choice is largely independent of action. You set a good example, but you cite very few papers compared to your readers. Word choice to nudge your readers might have a larger effect. Do your readers even notice your example?
My question is how to get people to link to public versions, not how to get them to jailbreak. I think that when I offer them a public link it is a good opportunity to shame them. If I call it an “ungated” link, that makes it sound abnormal, a nice extra, but not the default. An issue not addressed by my proposal is how to tell people that google scholar exists. Maybe I should not provide direct links, but google scholar links. Not search links, but cluster links (“all 17 versions”), which might also be more stable than direct links.
I don’t know. I know they often praise my articles for being well-cited, but I don’t know if they would say the same thing were every citation a mere link to Pubmed.
If you just want to shame them, then there’s much more comprehensible choice of terms. For example, ‘useful’ or ‘usable’. “Here is a usable copy”—implying their default was useless.
Universities have a lot subsriptions so that their students can access journal articles for free, so “privately circulated” perhaps isn’t as accurate as you’d like to think. Journals can also be accessed from libraries.
Feel free to elaborate on your reasons and goals for this (beyond the obvious signaling).
What is the obvious signaling?
That you are the type of person who thinks that all research should be freely available and charging for access to scientific journals is morally wrong. (You likely also prefer Linux over Windows because MS is evil, but put up with Apple because it is cool.)
I had to double-check that you weren’t secretly RMS.
RMS? Try Nina Paley cf
But today I am not encouraging people to violate copyright, just to prefer links that work.