A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
Rules
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.
Something doesn't add up here since you can't patent anything for decades.
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.
Seems like I messed up carrying over thoughts over language barrier.
Where was I unclear?
patents expire. so nestle shoudln't be able to "patenting human milk proteins for decades"
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?
For decades may as well be anything from 20 years up, afaik patents may live for 50 years so this seems to work fine
Maybe there is an Oxford comma? I understood what you meant
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
"...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
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.
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.
Tbf he evolutionarily developed that genome all by himself. That's how capitalism works
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.
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
Both are false
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.
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?
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 scientific journals as a public good, like libraries, or at least have a publicly funded option. 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. Even given that things cost money to run, for profit journals that can basically act as gatekeepers means there's also going to be excessive price gouging and profiteering and that needs to change.
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.
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.
Hahaha 🙃🙁😖😭
