Dear all
On a more lighthearted note, I had a look at quotations from the man himself
to see if any had bearing on the debate ;->
Here's a slightly deliberately provocative selection -- just for fun Stevan
(!) -- intended to provide some light relief, and not necessarily
representing my views ;->>
Declan
ON OPEN ACCESS?? ;->>:
"Sometimes one pays most for the things one gets for nothing."
Albert Einstein
"I never think of the future. It comes soon enough."
Albert Einstein
ON SUBSCRIPTIONS??:
"The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax."
Albert Einstein
ON CITATION COUNTS AND IMPACT FACTORS:
"Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be
counted counts."
Albert Einstein
ON PUBLISHING:
"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler."
Albert Einstein
"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one."
Albert Einstein
ON 'MANDATES'
"Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is
shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods."
Albert Einstein
"Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more
violent. It takes a touch of genius -- and a lot of courage -- to move in
the opposite direction."
Albert Einstein
"Peace cannot be kept by force. It can only be achieved by understanding."
Albert Einstein
"Great spirits have often encountered violent opposition from weak minds."
Albert Einstein
ON OPEN ACCESS TO RESEARCH WORTH 1.5BN A YEAR ;->>:
"Do not worry about your difficulties in Mathematics. I can assure you mine
are still greater."
Albert Einstein
"As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain;
and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality."
Albert Einstein
ON THE NEED FOR BALANCED DISCUSSION:
"Technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological
criminal."
Albert Einstein
"A human being is a part of a whole, called by us _universe_, a part limited
in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as
something separated from the rest... a kind of optical delusion of his
consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to
our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our
task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of
compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its
beauty."
Albert Einstein
"Science is a wonderful thing if one does not have to earn one's living at
it."
Albert Einstein
ON THE POLITICS OF SCIENCE PUBLISHING:
"Equations are more important to me, because politics is for the present,
but an equation is something for eternity."
Albert Einstein
ON THE INTERNET:
"You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his
tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand
this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they
receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat."
Albert Einstein
ON EXCESSIVE READING OF PUBLISHING-RELATED WEB FORUMS ;->:
"Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative
pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls
into lazy habits of thinking.
Albert Einstein
"If A is a success in life, then A equals x plus y plus z. Work is x; y is
play; and z is keeping your mouth shut."
Albert Einstein
-----Message d'origine-----
De : American Scientist Open Access Forum
[mailto:AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM_at_LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG] De la
part de eugene.garfield_at_THOMSON.COM
Envoyé : mercredi 28 septembre 2005 20:41
Ā : AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM_at_LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG
Objet : Re: What would Einstein had done today? and comment about Mendel
Dear David:
Would Mendel's work have been ignored if the Science Citation Index was
available 100 years ago?
http://www.garfield.library.upenn.edu/essays/V1p069y1962-73.pdf
Your comments about Mendel are really not appropriate for this discussion.
Please refer to the essay I did in 1970 in which I pointed out the
mythology about Mendel's work. Of course, it was Conway Zirkle who did the
detective work and I only took advantage of that to prove my point. Best
wishes. Gene Garfield
When responding, please attach my original message
__________________________________________________
Eugene Garfield, PhD. email: garfield_at_codex.cis.upenn.edu
home page: www.eugenegarfield.org
Tel: 215-243-2205 Fax 215-387-1266
Chairman Emeritus, ISI www.isinet.com
3501 Market Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104-3302
President, The Scientist LLC. www.the-scientist.com
400 Market Street, Suite 1250, Philadelphia, PA 19106-2501
Past President, American Society for Information Science and Technology
(ASIS&T) www.asis.org
-----Original Message-----
From: American Scientist Open Access Forum
[mailto:AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM_at_LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG] On
Behalf Of David Goodman
Sent: Tuesday, September 27, 2005 3:14 PM
To: AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM_at_LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG
Subject: Re: What would Einstein had done today?
Much the same is true of the new papers by Watson and Crick
published in Nature. Furthermore , they were involved in a
priority race with Pauling, who was working on the same problem, and would
certainly have chose the fastest means available.
In either case I think the papers would have been noticed just as well
as when they were published--as they were--in the the most prestigious
available journal.
One wants to say that really good work will be seen with any communication
system.
But consider the case of Mendel. He published only in a provincial academy
of
science journal. Even if people just found it by browsing, it would have
been found decades earlier in a web-based system, or a journal system with a
web component or supplement.
Dr. David Goodman
Associate Professor
Palmer School of Library and Information Science
Long Island University
dgoodman_at_liu.edu
-----Original Message-----
From: American Scientist Open Access Forum on behalf of Bo-Christer Björk
Sent: Mon 9/26/2005 3:18 AM
To: AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM_at_listserver.sigmaxi.org
Subject: What would Einstein had done today?
On the 26th of October 1905 the paper "Zur Electrodynamik bewegter Körper"
by an unknown researcher called Albert Einstein was published by Annalen der
Physik in Band 17, pp. 891-921
(
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/109924449/PDFSTART).
This paper is of course a landmark in the history of science, but it also
illustrates the big changes that the scientific publication process has gone
through in a century. The paper did not go through an anonymous peer review
but was read by the editor (Max Planck) who made a decision to publish it.
The process was extremely fast since the manuscript was sent in the 30th of
June and published three months later. It would probably have had problems
in passing a current day peer review process since it contains no
references, breaks with the prevailing paradigms in the field and at the
time lacked empirical evidence to back it up. What would Einstein do if he
wanted to publish his results today?. He would probably have posted a copy
of the manuscript to the open access repository for High Energy Physics
(
http://xxx.lanl.gov) and hoped that others would pick up the ideas and
spread the word via viral marketing.
Bo-Christer Björk
Received on Fri Sep 30 2005 - 06:10:30 BST