This is not fair for new authors, but maybe good for science. The Nobel laureate is playing with their own reputation, not the reputation of the journal doing the peer review. Plus reviewers may well see themselves as less qualified, and it thus makes sense to only reject such a paper if you spot an obvious error. What do you think?

The Wikipedia article on Z-Libraries suggests that the main domain is purposefully free of any pirated stuff. The article of the publishers is talking about the importance of also shutting down sites that link to the pirated sites. So it sounds as if only the sites with scholarly content are blocked in France, but not the main page.

The article “somehow” does not give much background information on what Z-Library offers. If you do not know the system, do have a look at Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-Library

I am stakeholder. Where can I vote? :-)

The search engines for Open Access articles are not particularly proprietor. The main on in Germany, BASE, is run by a scientific library. They are mostly rather bad and only searching for Open Access articles does not make scientific sense, you need to know all relevant studies.

The rest sounds like a social network for scientists like RG. Agree that this is something we need and also a good way to discover literature. I often look on the homepages of colleagues to find articles.

Yes, or at least the author claims that that is better than publishing in a hybrid journal. A good Open Access journal would naturally be even better.

How would federation help for open access journals? It is already open and there are search engines.

A federated alternative for RG sounds great. It is quite hard to get a social network going, especially with introverted scientists. RG used unethetical methods to get it going. Not sure our folks would be willing to replicated such behaviour to get a federated alternative going.

Next to inviting citations, it would also be nice for everyone to be able to add citations. Make it more of a collaborative effort than someone’s time line.

Would it need a way to make clear we are really interested in the citation? I feel that most cases people ask for citations, they mean to say diplomatically that the claim is nonsense.

I am totally not in a position to judge this project, but the topic fits and the up votes suggest people are interested.

Scientific vocabulary is a major problem producing translations from English to other languages as well. Making dictionaries is also an important task to make science more open. On our Wiki we have started collecting scientific dictionaries.

The University of Delft had a great service when I did my PhD there, they had a translator who corrected our English articles. She was really good and sometimes even gave good suggestions to improve the science. ;-) The university did this to get higher acceptance rates and thus more publications; my guess is that that was a good bet for their university rating.

A next step could be that I write an article in Dutch and the translator translates it in English. Then it would be no problem to use the English terms for science specific terms.

I was working on cloud structure at the time. My work would probably have been better if more work from Russian scientists were translated. They do top research on turbulence. No one ever punished me for not knowing the state-of-art (Russian) literature because the others also did not know, but as a science we would have been better of.

Thanks for the feedback. That is valuable. There are many people who have trouble seeing the value of translations. I was one not too long ago. So these are questions we need to be able to answer and likely the topic of an upcoming blog post. We only mentioned some reason briefly in the introduction.

P.S. Translating our English blog post to German also helped me see which formulations in English were not optimal. Next time I will translate my posts before publishing to have that added quality benefit.

When I was young, I also put conference contributions on my CV, publication list. In some fields they are important, in my field, not really. As the post mentions the title of the translation should mention it is a translation so that they are not confused with original research.

In other STEM fields, like mine (climatology), they are highly valuable. Many of the colleagues I work with at national weather services around the world are not good in English and were educated in French or Spanish.

Also in your field, some may be good scientists, able to read English enough, but lack the English skills to write a good article. If they could write the article in their mother tongue and have it translated they could contribure to scientific progress. You may not see those people because the current system wastes this talent.

I have not heard about shortages in Europe, but the labor conditions are also quite bad here. There is an enormous overproduction of post-docs compared to the number of real positions available next. Here in Germany that is even more excessive because postdocs (and PhD students) mostly work on project funding. The relatively rich federal government is only allowed to pay for project, while the poor states do the funding for the universities and their permanent positions.

In America there are people who claim that taxation is theft and one should only support people with charity. I have a hard time believing that they really think a sufficient level of support for necessities is possible from charity, even more so that this funding would be enough to ensure people flourish and contribute fully to society.

Similarly, the authors seem to argue that this Democratic Citizen Science model should do a large part (maybe all) of science. At least they complain that currently citizen science is a specialised niche product. That would require an enormous amount of people donating their free time to science.

Even in a society where people are no longer forced to do paid work to survive, I have a hard time believing so many people will do this on the side. If you do it on the side, you will need many times the participants that are currently doing it full time. Science would be a hobby that requires a big time investment (especially overhead) if the participants are to be really involved and take control.

Greater editorial staff representation correlated moderately with more published articles reporting research conducted in LMICs (Spearman ρ = 0.51; 95% CI, 0.25-0.70; P < .001).

It is funny how different people interpret correlations. I would not call a correlation of 0.5 for just one predictor “moderate”. That may be low for lab experiments or artificial objects, but it is pretty high for real life data.

This even punishes people sharing data to help their community:

Some of the scientists whose data were originally proprietary became active co-authors on the paper. By contrast, researchers whose data were accessible from the start are credited in the paper’s citations and acknowledgements, as is the convention in publishing.

If the reason for having a notability standard is to have enough people who are interested in reading and editing an article, then maybe the latter should be the actual rule. When an article is no longer current because too few people care, it is deleted. Might work better than trying to predict which articles may fail in future.

If you mean the abstract, that is for experts, not particularly educational in most cases.

I think you are right that many downloads are because Sci-Hub is much more convenient than the terrible landing pages of the publishers; only of the tell-tale signs of monopoly is terrible service; NO I DO NOT WANT YOUR SURVEILLANCE CUBE PDF and I do not want an additional click to get to the real PDF. Still my university in Bonn is reasonably well funded, but we still do not have subscriptions to many journals I regularly need. Even Harvard does not have all journals.

And they can create their own hell where the far-right is not criticized (“censored”). Although Trump Social will have to do some moderation, otherwise Google and Apple will remove them from the app store, which would eat into profits and Trump only cares about money.

Maybe people I hang out with are different. Climate scientists and especially female scientists get a lot of hate. People I know tend to be fed up with the terrible atmosphere and harassment, but they are locked in.