Because the journals existed as massive, financially powerful entities. There were negotiations over open access arrangements a few years back which led to things like “gold open access”, which involves papers being free to read, but costing a heckton for the researcher’s in “Article Processing Charges”. This happened because the journals effectively argued that “even though we’re functionally useless in the modern day, and don’t even provide services like copyediting or typesetting support for researchers, you can’t just make research actually be fully open, because then we would no longer be able to be absurdly profitable. Won’t someone think of the profits?!”. And then their influence meant the open access agreements were half baked and insufficient.

However, there is a continuing movement that is pushing for actual open access — “Diamond Open Access” doesn’t charge either the researchers or the readers of papers. It’s still small, relatively, but it’s growing, especially in the global South or amongst independent researchers who can’t afford absurd Article Processing Charges. Profit driven journals have prestige on their side, but I reckon that Diamond Open Access will continue to grow as research funding becomes more scarce relative to the amount of research being done.

“The diamond model has been especially successful in Latin America-based journals (95% of OA journals[1]) following the emergence of large publicly supported platforms, such as SciELO and Redalyc. However, Diamond OA journals are under-represented in the major scholarly databases, such as Web of Science and Scopus. It is also noteworthy, that high-income countries “have the highest share of authorship in every domain and type of journal, except for diamond journals in the social sciences and humanities”.”

(Source: the linked Wikipedia page)

And what’s worse, when there were some big negotiations on open access a few years back, the agreements were wholly insufficient and still disproportionately enriched the journals at the expense of researchers; “Gold Open Access” journals will publish the research unpaywalled, so anyone can read them, but will charge absurd “article processing charges” that are often thousands of dollars, shutting out researchers with less financial means (such as those in the global South or independent researchers).

Fortunately there is a growing movement who gives a fuck about actual open access; Diamond Open Access research involves no fees to either the author or the reader. This is how it should be.

‘The diamond model has been especially successful in Latin America-based journals (95% of OA journals[1]) following the emergence of large publicly supported platforms, such as SciELO and Redalyc. However, Diamond OA journals are under-represented in the major scholarly databases, such as Web of Science and Scopus. It is also noteworthy, that high-income countries “have the highest share of authorship in every domain and type of journal, except for diamond journals in the social sciences and humanities”.’^[1]

The future is here, it’s just unevenly distributed

[1]: Source: the linked Wikipedia page

Define robot.

I don’t think I am a robot, but the world often makes me feel like I am (it’s the 'tism)

Great explanation. I’m a biochemist who loves nerding out about this stuff (and practicing science communication), so I came into this thread prepared to explain more about this works. However, your comment has left me with nothing to do but to be appreciative of your excellent comment

Yeah, same here. I can remember a few different scattered interactions I’ve had with OP — enough that if they never posted again, I would notice their absence.

I wouldn’t say that trauma dumps are fun to read, but as someone who has plenty of trauma of my own, being able to relate to a random internet person has sometimes been a rare source of solace for me.

I’m sorry for your loss.

I’m going to share with you a sentiment that I don’t imagine you’ll be able to fully process right now, when everything is still so raw and jumbled, but I hope that in time, it might offer you some comfort, as it did for me.

When I lost my partner back in 2021, it made me think a lot about legacy — in particular, the fact that deciding a person’s legacy is a task that falls to the people who are left behind. On the days where the grief hurts particularly badly, this idea helps me to stay focussed on the duty I feel to carry my partner’s memory forwards, through embodying his virtues and learning from his flaws. It’s a heavy burden, but one I’m glad to carry.

It’s okay if thinking this way is too much for you right now, especially as you have so much on your plate in terms of logistics. I just wanted to share this with you because what you said about your dad’s birthday touched me. Your next few birthdays are going to be pretty rough, but I hope that in time, you’ll be able to remember the joke about how you’re your dad’s birthday present in a way that’ll still hurt, but in a warm, loving way that inspires you to continue making your dad proud. He might be gone, but you’ll always be his birthday present — a birthday present that will continue to become even better as you continue to learn and grow.

I’ve never lost a parent before, but I relate to what you describe about feeling untethered. That’s another part of why I commented. My partner used to be one of the tethers connecting me to the world, and losing him meant I needed to find new ways to anchor myself so that I could be the tether that holds his memory here. It’s disorienting and exhausting and the worst part is that when you feel like you’re beginning to adjust, another wave of grief will hit you when you’re least expecting it. Grief doesn’t happen all at once, nor does it follow a predictable path. Be kind to yourself over the coming weeks and months.

Good luck with taking the dog to the funeral home on Friday, and good luck with supporting other members of your family too. I hope that the funeral logistics go smoothly enough that you are able to find some time to begin the long process of reorienting yourself. And please don’t feel the need to reply to this comment if you don’t have the brain space for that. God knows you’ve got enough obligations on your plate

Research has actually shown that people respond better to people with Scottish accents. Apparently at least one big company (might have been British Gas?) factored this into their decision about where to base their upper tier customer service call centres

I made a wax seal last year so that I could be an extra bitch when sending letters to my friends.

I like sending people letters and postcards, because the added friction of the physical process makes it feel more meaningful. It’s almost got a ritual feel to it.

Oooh, I didn’t know this was the word for this. Thank you for sharing this knowledge with me

I have one, I just don’t know where it is. Do I count as civilised?

Although they’re struggling at the moment, due to their blood being harvested for use in biomedical research.^[1]. Although fortunately, there have been synthetic alternatives developed in the last few years, so hopefully their numbers should recover as that is phased in.

Edit: if this makes you feel overly sad, here is a palate cleanser(30 minute long, ideally listened to in one uninterrupted block). It’s one of my favourite things I stumbled across last year, and it makes me feel hopeful about the world. It made me cry, but in a good way.

[1]: Linked article has more info, but the TL;DR is that their blood clots in the presence of bacterial toxins, so it’s super useful in stuff like vaccine development and production. They capture the crabs, harvest the blood and return the crabs alive, and the stats that the system has on this says that only a small percentage of them end up dying as a result of this. However, given that we can’t see how many of them die or fail to reproduce in the weeks and months following their release, we can’t confirm that.

We do know that the numbers of a bird that feasts almost exclusively on horseshoe crab eggs have seen severe reductions over the last 40 or so years, so it seems likely that the impact of this harvesting on horseshoe crab populations is more severe than the official data suggests.

It’s unfortunate because they fall between the cracks when it comes to animal research ethics. For one, the research isn’t being done on them, so they probably wouldn’t be protected under most existing legislation anyway. But also, animal research legislation doesn’t tend to give much protection to invertebrates (with the exception of octopuses, which are smart enough that they get additional protections).

I think it’s a pretty interesting case study of a big gap in the legislation that protects the rights of animals — existing legislation focuses a lot on our duty to individual animals, but here, despite the harm to any one horseshoe crab seeming to be tolerably low, the vast scale at which we have been harvesting them has had an impact on the species as a whole.

My view is that an anthropocentric framework that puts humans above all other animals is probably harmful in general and something we should work to undermine, but that if we are taking that tack (which seems necessary for the utilitarian view of “harvesting these crabs’ blood has saved many human lives” that most people seem to take on this topic), then we must also accept that we have an ethical duty to be good stewards of the natural world. We can’t have it both ways and think of ourselves as so rational and smart, but not accept the responsibility that would come with that.

I find the legislative angle of it especially interesting, because most people I have told this to are shocked to learn of how they’re not protected, and they share at least some of my view that effective animal research ethics legislation should surely account for our duty to ecosystems as a whole. People far more learned than I in legal matters have struggled to think of ways we could effectively legislate this though. It’s possible that additional legislation isn’t the best way to handle this, and that we would be better served to aim to regulate in opposition to the economically extractivist ideology that seems to be the default setting nowadays (because horseshoe crabs are just an illustrative case study of the problem).

I apologise for info dumping in reply to your joyful comment with such downer info. I do feel hopeful about the progress of synthetic alternatives though. I also find it a fascinating topic to learn about, even if it is a bit depressing

Me.

I mean, I’m not particularly old — only 29. But I’m super surprised I still exist. And it’s not for lack of trying. It just turns out that even though I’m pretty mediocre at living, I’m even worse at dying. Fortunately, I’m in a place now where that’s a thing I’m happy about, for the most part.

I’ve got at least 8 different attempts under my belt, and the way that some of them failed makes me feel like it’s almost offensive to be an atheist. For instance, when I swam out into the sea, as far as I could until I couldn’t anymore, and the next thing I remember was waking up on the beach, not super far from where I’d swam from. I thought that was a thing that only happened in movies. Granted, I’m not a strong swimmer, so I didn’t get very far out, but still.

That was one of my attempts as an adult, but I had a lot as a teenager too. When I was about 16, I was resentful of all the people who cared about me, because the guilt I felt over hurting them was the only thing keeping me alive. Building off of the crisis management advice that I’d seen that said it’s good to try to put some distance between you and your suicidal feelings by trying to hold off until the next day, for instance, I resolved that I would stick around until I was 20, and if nothing had improved by then, I would kill myself and fuck anyone who begrudged me this escape — no-one could say I didn’t try.

Well, it turns out that some things did improve by age 20 — enough that it suggested there was a non-zero hope that I could some day live and actually be happy to be alive. I still struggled a lot after that point, because it’s not like my mental health was magically resolved (it still isn’t), but I’m glad I stuck around.

In a way though, things got harder after age 20. Ironically, there were countless times throughout my late teens in which looking forward to my death was the only thing that saved my life. When things were particularly rough, I would work out how many days I had to go before I could rest, and it soothed me. After I was 20, however, I was unanchored. I had a life that didn’t feel like it was my own, because I never expected to make it this far. Even now, it still sometimes feels like I’m in a bonus level. It’s a bizarre feeling.

But yeah, I, and many of the people who know and love me, are surprised that I’m still around. I’m proud of myself, even if a significant part of why I’m still here is sheer luck. Obviously this wasn’t what you meant when asking your question, but I’ve been reflecting on my progress a lot lately, and the idea of giving this answer amused me. It feels healing to joke about this stuff a bit, I think

My mum didn’t do anything as bad as that, but your comment made me reflect and realise that there weren’t really any instances I can recall of my mum sitting down to help me tidy up my room. I’d just end up shoving everything under my bed when it came time for the weekly check for our pocket money and then doing a massive organise every few months or so (but it would never stay tidy for long.

What’s especially interesting was that I was quite enthusiastic about tidying and cleaning other parts of the house; we could do extra chores for extra pocket money. I wonder whether my attitude towards cleaning the bathroom and the kitchen was different to my room because I had to be shown how to do these tasks, as opposed to being left to my own devices with my bedroom

I think that distrohopping is part of the experience for power users.

I’ve had a couple of people recognise me from previous comments I made. It really warmed my heart to hear. I don’t post often, but I do comment a fair amount.

If there are any guys here who are in the UK, I can strongly recommend Andy’s Man Club, a charity that does weekly peer support social sessions for men.

They’ve got groups all over the country, and although I personally haven’t been (I’m a woman), I’ve heard so many good things about it from guys I know.

This is bending the prompt somewhat, but I was once almost struck by lightning. I was walking home through a park, and based on how soon I had been hearing the thunder after each flash of lightning, the storm was basically right on top of me. I was feeling pretty nervous, and tried to take a route with minimal tall trees, but I was a teenager and didn’t know what else to do but to keep heading home

All of a sudden, I was filled with a sense of foreboding, and I felt an overwhelming instinct to get away from where I currently was. It was so strong that I dove off to the side, before I heard one of the loudest sounds I had ever heard. Based on where the lightning had seemed to hit, I was very lucky, as it looked like I would have been caught in it had I been standing where I was a moment before. I assume that the wrongness I was feeling before I jumped aside was subconsciously recognising the electric charge buildup in the air or something. I don’t know.

Either way, I’m glad I jumped. In an alternate timeline, I’d have dove and felt very silly after nothing at all happened. Or alternatively, I might have jumped aside and still been affected. Who knows ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Thanks for the link. There have been a few people in this thread making this point, and I was considering asking them to elaborate so that I can gauge what my risk is from using pip for python. I appreciate you providing a resource so I can go learn more about this

Pentiment was great. You can feel that it’s made with so much passion.

I played with a friend who was a medievalist sitting beside me, and she confirmed that all the weird and wonderful marginalia animals were from actual manuscripts

What’s your basis for saying the vast majority are into it as a kink thing? Because I’m someone who used to feel uneasy about furries for much the same reason you are — but that was when I personally knew few, if any people who were furries.

Over the last few years, my work has meant that I’ve met more furries than I can count, becoming friends with many of them, and developing a better understanding of what being a furry offers them. It’s not a sex thing for the vast majority of furries I have known. This isn’t just based on my experience either — I have an artist friend who draws furry porn for a living. Although she is not a furry herself, she exists in close proximity to the furry community so that she can network and get commissions, and she agrees that the people for whom it’s a kink thing is a minority