I often find myself researching obscure topics that lead me to scientific journals, at which point I become frustrated as heck.  Many of them force you to pay inordinate fees to access the article.  I know if I just went to the local university’s library I could track down the article for free, but that would be pain of a different kind, requiring a lot of time.  In the end, I have to read the article to know whether I’d like to pay to read it.  And this is supposedly peer-reviewed scientific research, not something being done for a profit.  It just seems wrong to me.  Perhaps you’ve followed the controversy about newspapers, where the online world is eating their lunch and causing tremendous mayhem in the industry.  It’s about high time for this to happen with scientific journals too.  Thinking back to my college days, I would much rather have been able to access all that knowledge via Google search and online than in paper form in a musty old research section of the school library.  That also eliminates the possibility of other students monopolizing (or worse hiding to shift the curve) key materials needed for graded work.

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Tim O’Reilly forwards Dave Gray’s excellent “Free the Facts” presentation

I was pleasantly surprised to read of a journal that requires the research to go up on Wikipedia before they’ll publish.  In this case its the RNA Biology Journal, which is published by Nature.  Scientists all over should simply insist on their work being published to the web as well as to journals.  And don’t even start with journals needed to charge as much as they do to get it out on print.  Maybe they shouldn’t be trying to get it out on print?

Is it just me or is this new version of Google Reader buggy as heck?  I’ve waited patiently for the bugs to subside, but it almost seems like they’re getting worst. 

They mostly manifest as a ton of repaint issues.  The list of feeds, for example, doesn’t show all of my feeds and frequently corrupts itself.  I can see them all in “Manage My Subscriptions”, but the list is a mess.  I’ve got 180 odd feeds, but I can’t imagine what it must be like for someone with a lot of feeds to try to use it like that.  Worse, I can no longer create new folders because the drop down box showing the list of folders is also corrupted.

Sorry to be harsh, but when is Google going to get over producing software as a hobby?  These are real tools that people expect to work right.  Presumably Google wants broad adoption and means to stick with something like Google Reader.  The occasional problem is one thing, but these would be Priority 1 bugs at any software company I ever worked with.

I’m not the only one:

See comments here.

Why are news readers so buggy?