Re:A mysterious company’s Covid-19 papers in top medical jou...
by fragmede on Wednesday June 03, 2020 @04:14PM
(#23408090)
> read a lot of papers
In order to do this, those that are serious need to be able to access papers, but paying hundreds or thousands of dollars for Elsevier can put them out of reach.
Re:A mysterious company’s Covid-19 papers in top medical jou...
by knzhou on Wednesday June 03, 2020 @04:35PM
(#23408332)
Indeed, but that is the problem that preprints can solve. (As in, they don't solve the problem of telling what is correct, because that's just inherently hard, but they solve the problem of giving access so people can learn to tell.)
Re:A mysterious company’s Covid-19 papers in top medical jou...
by stephc_int13 on Wednesday June 03, 2020 @04:23PM
(#23408181)
There is also the problem with cost and access. (Remember Aaron Swartz)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz
In my opinion, the best option for everybody who's serious about this is to read a lot of papers, until you become "well-calibrated", i.e. when you have a good handle on the overall chances a preprint is true, vs. a Twitter thread, vs. a paper in a top-tier journal. This has to be learned from experience. Reform doesn't change the fact that you need to do this -- it just adds yet another venue, either more or less reliable than the previous ones, that you also need to become calibrated on.