Where by "the public" you mean "people who are willing to pay the Nature Publications Group $32 per article, or subscribe to Nature for a few hundred bucks per year per journal, or who happen to routinely take the time to travel to a library which subscribes to the Nature journals."

In other words, you mean: Other scientists. Which is what this study apparently tries to back up with actual statistics.

Scientific publications aren't secret, exactly. They're just orders of magnitude more obscure than everything else in our society. I can sit in a chair and read entire encyclopedias of trivia, download entire albums and movies, I can buy the complete works of various popular novelists and read them on my Kindle for ten bucks apiece, I can barely avoid learning about the various memes of the day, yet I can't read the average scientific article unless I'm paying tuition, working as a postdoc, physically sitting in MIT's library, or willing to pay the cost of a hardcover book.

1) Publications are increasingly easy to find via services such as google scholar, pubmed, and citeseer. Often times, these services will link to freely downloadable versions of the paper. However, should this not be the case, you still have two options.

2) Go to the author's website. It's very common for academics to put preprints or other free versions of their papers on their personal websites. You may need to check all the authors on the paper, but a good rule of thumb is to check the first listed author and the last listed author.

3) If the above isn't available and you really want to get access to the paper, you can always try emailing the authors and asking for a copy. As with personal copies on websites, giving out copies to those who ask is allowed by most journals.

4) As you point out, you can physically go to a library and use a public terminal. Most large cities have universities. Save up the hard to find references and make a weekly or monthly trip to the local university library.

In the far past, you used to have to go down into the "stacks" at a university and dig out a physical copy of a paper you wanted. These stacks were not always accessible to the public and did not always contain the journal you wanted. In comparison, academic material today is more accessible to the average member of the public than it has ever been.

The broader issue as I see it, is that for a layperson or a hobbyist in a scientific field it is near impossible to find papers that you did not hear about through the media or by being in proximity to the authors.

If you do happen upon them, it's usually by pure dumb luck and happenstance. More centralized and open locations for discourse are required.

How about a ycombinator for scientific research?

o.

The trouble is that services needs to be domain specific and it is likely a full time job to continually mine the journals for new content. User submissions are an excellent idea, but probably not sufficient on their own. For example, there is already HN-like site for biomed: http://hackermed.com/hot

There is opportunity here, especially in the areas like health and fitness which are more popular to the public.

Now, I am not the biggest fan of peer review, but in my discipline, you can't publish a smile without peer review in any meaningful journal. Most good science never ends up in the press, cause media simply can't relate to it. I always think about PCR. If it was "discovered today", would something as profoundly important even get a whimper of attention?

And most scientific papers actually don't make outlandish claims. If anything they make rather mundane claims. For example, a new algorithm for Q-SAT that reduces the complexity in the presence of a K-Oracle from O(3.5^mn) to O(pi^m(3.5/pi)n).

I'd love to hear your comment on the suggestion

http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fj...

that most published research findings are false, despite peer review.

A common mistake is to do things such as mining for correlations. A stronger grounding in statistics would definitely help most scientists (and ppl in general -- one reason I support the push to replace calculus with statistics in HS math).

Although oddly, even if most finding are false they typically create the basis to do an actual real follow-up study, with actual hypothesis' which are much more likely to give real results. IOW, these false findings still accelerate the rate that science occurs. Although better science upfront would be more efficient still.

Many discoveries in the past come from failed experiments. The failing to achive a desired result can have as much merit for future discovery as a successful enterprise.

The scientific community balks at learning from others mistakes and has a tendancy to ostracise those that failed.

I personally enjoy the insights into the mindsets and thoughs behind an avenue of research, successful or failed. I find it helps give me a glimps at what others feel is possible.

O.

I see you are being severely downvoted, and disagreed with specifically on the quoted point. Did you perhaps mean "Scientists tend to issue press releases about studies that aren't yet peer-reviewed"? I can think of several examples of that, which have been posted here to HN. The most notorious recent example was the "arsenic-based life" example,

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/debate-over-arsenic-b...

the subject of several HN threads. Jumping the gun on the peer review process by issuing press releases before peer review does seem to be a common failing, and altogether too many submissions to HN on science issues are based on such press releases. But as mechanical_fish points out, it would help the situation for the general public (and journalists) if the actual peer-reviewed scientific literature, with all its faults

http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fj...

were readily available to members of the general public.