Posts by Carol Stewart
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Hard News: Complaint and culture, in reply to Emma Hart,
At the time, it felt like the lactation consultant in Rotorua hospital saved my life. Such was her awesomeness.
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Hard News: Complaint and culture, in reply to George Darroch,
I think we basically agree, George. The only thing is that if academics are going to do it as they have always done it then this is hardly going to revolutionise the system.
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Hard News: Complaint and culture, in reply to Sacha,
I agree, and I am sympathetic to the point George is making too. But I do think the principle of free public access to knowledge which,as you say, is primarily funded by the public is a good one.
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Hard News: Complaint and culture, in reply to George Darroch,
But George, people in universities are not the only users of knowledge. It's all very well for them having free electronic journal access.
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Hard News: Complaint and culture, in reply to Sacha,
Reading a single article published by one of Elsevier's journals will cost you $31.50. Springer charges €34.95, Wiley-Blackwell, $42. Read 10 and you pay 10 times. And the journals retain perpetual copyright. You want to read a letter printed in 1981? That'll be $31.50.
Thanks for the interesting link, Sacha.
Monbiot is right. I recently bought a 1981 paper from an engineering journal as there was no alternative way of getting hold of it. It cost me $30USD and I was only able to print it once and could only save a PDF to my own PC. The printed copy was plastered with warnings about not being allowed to share it or reproduce it.
The alternative model that is being developed is the open access academic journals - unlimited free public access to journal contents. In the field I work in, we think this is a great idea because a lot of practitioners who are interested in the field (say, people from local and regional authorities) don't necessarily have electronic journal access via a university library and it would be a huge benefit to them to have access to journals in their field. Plus, of course, it's a good idea in itself for reasons explained very well by Monbiot.
Open access journals have a substantial article submission charge - it's $900USD for one journal I'm involved with. This, of course, is meeting with a lot of resistance from the scientific community. But it does seem to me that it's the future.
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Hard News: Complaint and culture, in reply to Kumara Republic,
Karl du Fresne’s columns seem to follow an hour-glass pattern – either he writes very, very well, or he writes very, very badly, with little middle ground.
You're quite right, DeepRed. He is a binary creature. The column I was referring to was a series of questions, of which some were quite reasonable, and some were just offensive and stupid, like the one on climate change, and this little beauty:
Why do so many women drivers tailgate? Um, what? -
Hard News: Complaint and culture, in reply to Russell Brown,
And I'm sure he's not malicious, just eccentric.
Brian Edwards, when he discussed the BSA ruling on Jim Mora's program, made much of the angle that McDonald was a pensioner being victimised by a big bullying institution. I thought this was completely missing the point. There still needs to be a mechanism for filtering out frivolous complaints. Not that BSA went the right way about it, mind.
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Hard News: Complaint and culture, in reply to 3410,
Meh. BSA is for judging complaints, not complainants.
But there needs to be a mechanism for dealing with vexatious complaints, surely?
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Hard News: Auckland City Nights, in reply to Lucy Stewart,
I think it's the element of coercion that I dislike the most.
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Hard News: Complaint and culture, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
TVNZ should have a corrections and clarifications page on their website, like the Guardian.
Credit to Rod Oram, in his SST column, for acknowledging that he had made some errors in his article the previous week, and for putting them right.
He makes a refreshing change to other regular columnists who just spout forth unsupported cr&p and don't seem at all concerned about errors of fact. Like, for instance, Karl du Fresne, in today's DomPost who asks:Ever wondered by so many believers in man-made global warming angrily demand that the media stifle the views of sceptics, but never the other way round?
Just .. GAH.