You must log in or register to comment.
“…he sought funding from the private sector to start Celera Genomics. The company planned to profit from their work by creating genomic data to which users could subscribe for a fee.”
Fuck this guy
What even is this argument?
“Scientists who say they can’t afford to do X should do X”? Does he think this makes him sound smart?
Tbf he evolutionarily developed that genome all by himself. That’s how capitalism works
I’m not even sure what he’s talking about. Open access journals are the ones who charge authors to publish.
If you publish in a journal that has closed access, there is generally no fee to publish. If you want your paper to be open access, you can tack on an additional open access fee so that your paper doesn’t end up behind a paywall. The last time I looked - and this was several years ago - the going rate for making your paper open access in a closed access journal was about $2-3k. We always budgeted for publication fees when we were putting together our funding proposals.
The fee structure is similar for open access journals, except that there’s not a choice about paying them. For researchers whose work isn’t grant funded, it generally means they’re paying out of pocket, unless their institution steps in.
I had a paper published in a small but (in its field) prestigious journal, and the editor explained to me that he only charges people who can afford it, and uses those funds to cover the costs of the journal. He explained that he had a paper from a researcher who couldn’t cover the publishing fee, and he let me know that I was helping out the other person, too.
What I don’t understand is how anyone how has gone through academia doesn’t know this.
If you publish in a journal that has closed access, there is generally no fee to publish.
What field are you in? In the life sciences, there’s normally a fee to publish closed-access and a higher one for open-access. My last paper was open access and costed about 3500, compared to 1500 pay walled.
no fees in closed access in organic chemistry, as far as i know. some other subfields can be different
open access can be easily two, three grands, and you better have a grant that covers this
Can’t you just post that sheet all ober the Internet?
Of course you can put it anywhere you’d like. Services like arXiv specialize in hosting pre-prints of published papers as well as white papers that only have an institutional association.
The problem is that the job of an academic is to publish. That’s how you build credibility and seniority. For it to count as a “published paper” it needs to have undergone peer review so that the people who want to read/cite the paper at least have the confidence that it’s at least been reviewed by other experts in the field.
There are some “journals” that will publish anything as long as they get their fees. Most academics are wise to that by now, but it can still impress people in business for whom a pub is a pub.
Nestlé has been patenting human milk proteins for decades. To my understanding, this prevents other companies to add such molecules to baby formula, even if somehow methods to synthesize said molecules were developed.
That is a scary notion, a malevolous intent and a gross outcome.
These shouldn’t hold up. Wouldn’t the prior work of thousands of generations of mothers invalidate such a patent.
“Excuse me madam but do you have a license to use those tits? No? Didn’t think so. The content of those bazongas is Nestle property. I’m afraid I’m going to have to clamp those nipples until such time as the proper Bandonkadonk subscriptions are paid”
As long as the tits aren’t used for commercial purposes you don’t need a license. Anyway, I doubt that in Europe you could patent any naturally occuring molecules in any kind of milk.
You can patent pretty much anything in Europe.
However, enforcing those patents is a completely different affair.
Have you considered a career in avian taxonomy?
i got this new legal drama plot. basically there’s this patent infringer except she’s got huge boobs. i mean some serious honkers. a real set of badonkers. packin some dobonhonkeros. massive dohoonkabhankoloos. big ol’ tonhongerekoogers.
what happens next?!
lawyer shows up with even bigger bonkhonagahoogs. humongous hungolomghononoloughongous
I read this story in Barney Stinson’s voice.
Something doesn’t add up here since you can’t patent anything for decades.
Seems like I messed up carrying over thoughts over language barrier.
Where was I unclear?
Maybe there is an Oxford comma? I understood what you meant
patents expire. so nestle shoudln’t be able to “patenting human milk proteins for decades”
For decades may as well be anything from 20 years up, afaik patents may live for 50 years so this seems to work fine
Patents can be renewed, to my knowledge, and “for decades” as in “since the 90s”.
Patents can’t be renewed. After expiring, they become public domain.
Usually, patents have a lifetime for 20 years. Maybe you get an extension for 5 years. From were do you have the info that patents can be renewed?
I read that as:
For decades, Nestle has been patenting milk proteins.
They’ve been doing it for a long time, not somehow getting extra-long patents.
Prior work exists, source: all of history lol
Imagine Nestle executives finding a time machine and going to all of history’s most famous persons’ mothers and telling them how they can’t breastfeed their kids.
Someone should definitely write a book about that
Venter is one of the many quacks who promised that he’d find the “aging gene” and switch it off. People threw a lot of money at him about twenty years ago.
Haven’t we known about the aging part of genes (telomeres) for like 80 years
Hmm, I have no expertise in this field. I recently read that aging happens, because when cells replicate their DNA a gazillion times, then sometimes they introduce slight inaccuracies or mistakes, which I guess, means tons of tiny chunks of our body will have slightly different DNA from what we got born with…?
From the little I’ve just read about telomeres, it sounds like they help to prevent some of these mistakes. Is that you mean?
IIRC, telomeres are essentially the self-destruct button for DNA. They get shorter everytime DNA replicates and when they are all used up, DNA stops replicating and the cell destroys itself. The telomeres help prevent too many mutations from building up or cancer from forming.
They was some research on animals that indicates that resetting the telomeres can extend the lifespan of the animal. But, without the telomeres, cancer and mutations eventually kill the organism.
Interesting. Yeah, it sounds like the only real way to prevent aging, would be to create a clone of yourself, let that clone grow up until their body is fully developed and then organ-harvest them to replace all of your organs one-by-one, until you’ve eventually ship-of-theseus-ed yourself. Well, and repeat that process every thirty years or so.
Certainly not quite as sexy of a process as some skincare lotions promise…
You would never be able transplant the brain, and it’s still subject to the mutations and telomeres. The only way would be to transplant the personality Altered Carbon style or completely cure brain cancer.
Yeah, that’s true. Maybe you could pull off two or three cycles without hotswapping the brain, but eventually you’d have to rejuvenate yourself by just teach everything you know to one of your clones.
…which sounds an awful lot like just having children. 🙃
I wonder if it would be possible to transplant to transplant the brain in pieces over several cycles? That way the brain could eventually be replaced by dupli-babies. Memory might become problematic though.
Paywalled articles are still openly available if you politely email the researcher. While we should strive to have no barrier, if you can’t afford to publish openly those who need the research can still acquire it under the table. Having research unpublished because the researchers could not afford to pay the fee is worse than having the research published in a closed journal.
I’ve gotten a few dozen papers from closed journals that way, and I’ve never been told no.
Also, if you are starting your career, it’s ridiculous to ask you to pay for open access. At least in the third world, you can barely eat with your money.
Or use scihub
if scihub went down academia would crumble
My prof. said sci-hub is like banned and papers older than 2022 are not availiable. Is that true or thats only for some instances?
Banned from use in the uni perhaps. It’s working fine and I just pulled a paper from the 90s the other day
Nope he said its illegal and site is blocked.
I’m sorry i mean papers newer than 2022 are not availiable
And if the author is from 1899 ?
LitCrit has a healthy backlog in those JSTOR locked away journals.
I’ve never considered that since I’m in cybersecurity, so the oldest paper I’ve seen that is from the late 80s. The majority is from the mid 90s onwards though, and due to the fast moving nature of the field anything that is old enough to have a dead author is likely out of date.
then it’s your duty to sail the high seas like it’s 1899
Just because you’ve never been told no (n = 1) it doesn’t mean you’re guaranteed success. Authors aren’t obligated to do as you ask.
Surely there has to be a cost to the infrastructure of publishing and curation though. And possibly all the work of setting up and organizing the peer review process. So they probably charge the institutions or authors submitting the paper instead of their readers. But perhaps we should treat it as a public good, like libraries, or have universities and institutions fund it for the public good.
But it’s mostly a scam. The costs don’t remotely compare to the revenue. Reviewers time is not paid, and there’s a price to both publish and access. It’s all about the prestige to publish. If you contact the author directly they’ll typically gladly send you the article for free.
Oh absolutely. I agree. I don’t think anyone’s disputing that something about it needs to change.
The issue is partly that, over time, private entities are going to price gouge or take similar measures (see: “enshittification”) in order to keep growing as profit falls over time. That’s just how the profit motive works, it eventually optimizes everything for profit, not just what you are comfortable with having turned into a vehicle aimed solely at making money.
So yes, this and many other important things should be treated as public goods.
Hahaha 🙃🙁😖😭
Sci-hub
Well, he does have a point though. #OpenAccess
Footnote: Yeah, I saw that he had done some bad faith research, but remember open access is for everyone in the world, not just free rider corporate shills.
Footnote 2: If it is not feasible to go for gold OA journals, please go for green route: publish in closed but allows authors to put it up on preprint like arXiv.
For folks that don’t know, Venter had a company, Celera, they competed with the Human Genome Project (HGP) run by the US Gov’t. They developed interesting techniques to sequence, I believe they are credited with shotgun sequencing.
How were they able to compete?? The HGP published all their work openly, Venter and co used the freely accessible data alongside their own proprietary methods to try and sequence the human genome first themselves.
If I recall correctly it was considered a tie and they both jointly published the first sequenced human genome in Science.
shotgun sequencing predates celera and the HGP, but yeah
Aw crap, my bad, appreciate the correction. I thought they applied it in a novel way or something? Anyways Venter’s business practice sucks.
yeah, from what i remember, they pioneered a form of it called double-barrel shotgun sequencing, where both ends of the sequenced DNA fragment are analyzed for overlap instead of just one.
Eyyy, coming in with a save! Thanks! I appreciate the info.
He owns a yacht. I’d be interested to hear of a single yacht owner who is a decent person. I’m not sure one exists.
Edit: Thanks for the cool examples of decent people with yachts!
Noah seemed like a chill dude. Man liked his drink, for sure. Loved animals…
Noah brought along mosquitos, the guy is filled with hate
Noah would’ve been a genocide-complicit, doomsday cult prepper, similar to those who build private libertarian cities on the ocean or some planet as a climate adaptation strategy.
Wasn’t he the one that banged his daughters? Idk there was a few of those types in the bible.
Lot.
And actually, to be “fair” to him, his daughters raped him.
As written it’s not strictly his fault. Even if his parenting skills clearly lack.
Noah was the original Joe Exotic, except with every single exotic pet in existence
My ex-teamlead owns a yacht (if he didn’t sell it). The catch is that yacht is worth about $40 thousands, not $4 millions.
Also there was a person in USSR who built a yacht and circumnavigated the Earth on that, not everyone who do own a yach own that luxury slab of floating gold
That’s awfully cheap for a yacht. Did it float?
Some people live on yachts and that’s their entire home. So like a 70,000£ yacht, then like 300£ a month in slip (berth) fees, including electric and whatnot. I strongly considered it. It’s roughly the same cost but better than caravan living, IMO.
It’s a decent alternative to a landlocked home.
But yeah, millionaires with yachts are a different thing.
That’s a good use case. I’d be interested to know more about the idiosyncrasies that come with that lifestyle, like if they go out to sea when a storm is expected, or just weather it out in the harbor.
They are almost always better in their dock, specifically boats optimised as condos are terrible at sea since open ocean is not in their design brief
Perhaps they might be better up river as far as they can go
The one guy who downvoted owns a yacht
This person seems decent. Her and her S.O. live on a 50-year-old 36’ sailboat that they bought for $7000 and refit themselves.
That’s an excellent exception, and quite interesting. Thanks for the link!
