Fake Research Paper Based on Star Trek: Voyager's Worst Episode Was Published by a Scientific Journal

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What are your thoughts on this?

Me personally. Scientific research journals have a long history of being behind a pay wall. Some have argued that they should be free. Others have argued the review process is joke. This case is one of those.

the pay wall nature of journals as been a thing since the printing press and before. should it be this way for some i can argue that but for all i can also argue against it. if the topic is funded by the government then it should be free to read. but if done with private funds only then it should be a payed to view. that way they can at least keep going. but after a few years it should go free so we can all benefit from the knowledge provided. but thats just my short and easy 2 cents.

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This is a serious blunder. The fact that this was in a biological Journal is pretty bad.

We all know that the social sciences have been found to publish nonsensical studies (Sokal affair and some others), but when the hard sciences start to do so, the scientific community should start shaking a bit.

Honestly, the entire pay-to-publish and paywall for scientific literature is some terrible bullshit that hurts science more than it helps. Many authors of scientific studies now simply put their studies up as pdf on their own websites, but it is still a hassle to search for these. A central repository (cough cough, lib gen? … cough sci hub?) is much easier to access and search.

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A central repository (cough cough, lib gen? … cough sci hub?) is much easier to access and search.

You mean like arXiv? :wink:

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Yeah! Something like that! Except with a design that doesn’t date back to 1995. :slight_smile:

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Dude, the evolutionary cycle does not count the fact that evolution requires proper environmental factors, and many people just jumped to the conclusion we just turn into worms if our environment is a clean spaceship during evolution…

Not to mention momentum infinity is impossible. Even if you were spagettified in a black hole, your matter is still spread out over space-time like toothpaste, not everywhere at once.

Well yes, but not everything is on arXiv

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Unfortunately not. :confused:

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For me, this sort of thing is a nice joke, but it’s also useful. It is necessary to test the review process of various journals and see where there are holes that need patching.
Academic journals, and academia in general, cannot afford to slack off. It is the de-facto repository and primary source for a large part of humanity’s knowledge and know-how. Considering that anti-intellectualism is still a thing and isn’t fading out, research-publishing outlets need to be kept to the highest possible standards and called out on their mistakes (the real ones, that is).

Its empire baby, and this train ain’t stopping until she derails. Plato was a Roman slave, who was well compensated as slave wages go, because he earned his master a lot of money. He could write and schmooze with the best of them, and used his influence to have all 76 works of his biggest competitor, Democritus, burned throughout the empire as, “Ugly and demeaning”. To no one’s surprise, he went on to become the authority throughout the land, in ethics and aesthetics. That’s what happens whenever money and the gun do all the talking worth listening to in Babylon, while Plato went on to enjoy all the amenities that Rome had to offer which, frankly, made his home town of Athens look like a truck stop. Meanwhile, half of Rome would go on the dole, while they imported talent from around the world.

No. He supposedly was sold into slavery by the tyrant of Sicily (not Rome!) after basically insulting his rule, but he was pretty much immediately recognised by a friend (Anniceris) at the slave auction, who bought his freedom. This is the account that Diogenes Laërtius gives of that story, but it may be partly or entirely fictional, we have no idea. And neither do you.
However, we simply have no account of him being sold in Rome.

Well, first, Rome was definitely not an empire back then, it was only beginning to consider expansionism. The imperial period is centuries later.
Second, the loss of Democritus’ writings is indeed a colossal and irreplaceable loss for science and philosophy, but Plato is far from the only one to blame. He is guilty of having suggested the idea of an auto-da-fé, not having carried it out. Christian monks in the late antiquity and early middle-ages did most of it, though, while Plato and Aristotle were still actively transcribed and translated on the other side of the Mediterranean.

Again, not a roman slave.

If your truck stop has a Parthenon and is a major naval power, sure.

So, you are arguing that a possibly fictional account of a book burner does not agree with mine.