Timeline for Are Links to Articles Behind a Paywall Acceptable Answers?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
24 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Sep 12, 2018 at 3:06 | comment | added | user21349 | given that our target audience is professional mathematicians and graduate students, I don't think that is a problem I teach at a community college in the US, and I have no access to paywalled journals. To get access to journals, I have to drive to a university. | |
| Sep 9, 2018 at 3:58 | comment | added | Todd Trimble Mod | @fedja Please raise a flag for any such occurrence. | |
| Sep 9, 2018 at 1:03 | comment | added | fedja | @ToddTrimble "if you or anyone else should ever see a link to a weird pirate website at MathOverflow, then you should report it right away;" Sure. Precise reference more than suffices, doesn't it? :-) | |
| Sep 5, 2018 at 18:17 | comment | added | Todd Trimble Mod | @LSpice Yes, please flag it if you can find it. | |
| Sep 5, 2018 at 14:03 | comment | added | LSpice | @ToddTrimble, I saw such a link just yesterday, and wasn't sure what to do. (Unfortunately, I now forget where.) What is the proper action? Should I flag? | |
| Sep 3, 2018 at 22:30 | comment | added | Todd Trimble Mod | @AndyPutman I think we probably do agree then, fundamentally. I can picture myself making the same speech; that's what libraries are for! The graduate student is obviously making his or her life rather harder with that attitude. | |
| Sep 3, 2018 at 21:59 | comment | added | David Roberts Mod | "given that our target audience is professional mathematicians and graduate students, I don't think [access to libraries] is a problem" this attitude strikes me as 'let them eat cake'. Many university libraries around the world cannot afford to buy all the journals. The very rationale for Sci-Hub (for good or ill) is that the founder literally could not get access to the papers she needed to read for her research. I agree with all your other points. | |
| Sep 3, 2018 at 21:45 | history | edited | Andy Putman | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Sep 3, 2018 at 21:43 | comment | added | Andy Putman | @GerhardPaseman: I suspect that many of our disagreements here stem from the fact that I view MO as a resource intended for professional mathematicians and graduate students (together with people who intellectually are isomorphic to those kinds of people; for instance, non-professionals like Todd and the occasional crazy-advanced undergraduate). This is what makes it such a useful resource. I would be much less likely to participate if the level or signal-to-noise ratio drifted downward too much. | |
| Sep 3, 2018 at 21:37 | comment | added | Andy Putman | @ToddTrimble: I suspect that we basically agree, and certainly I have never felt tempted to criticize you in any way. I have repeatedly had the following experience in "real life". A graduate student comes to me with a question. I tell them an article where their question is answered. Later on I ask if they found the article useful, and I learn that since they couldn't find a scan of it online, they didn't pursue it. I then give them my speech about how we have a wonderful library and they should learn to use it! I see indications of this attitude sometimes here on MO. | |
| Sep 3, 2018 at 21:22 | comment | added | Todd Trimble Mod | Andy, if you or anyone else should ever see a link to a weird pirate website at MathOverflow, then you should report it right away; we simply can't have or endorse any legally questionable activity. Also, I too decry linking to sketchy papers; I hope that's not a huge problem here. I'm not quite sure I grasp concretely the phenomenon of intellectual laziness that you say you see; speaking personally, if I'm hunting for knowledge, I'll do what it takes to get it, but I'm much happier if I can access it off the WWW without a lot of hassle. Maybe we agree more than appears. | |
| Sep 3, 2018 at 21:18 | comment | added | Gerhard Paseman | Indeed, and I think you get to choose with whom to talk and to respond and how to respond. I do not think every post should become or even link to a Wikipedia article. I am with you in the idea that a relevant and intelligible answer is first priority. I am not with you in (the impression I gather from your responses in that) the target is professional mathematicians and graduate students. Thus my next priority is accessibility, and we can disagree on how far to go with that. Gerhard "It Is A Balancing Act" Paseman, 2018.09.03. | |
| Sep 3, 2018 at 21:00 | comment | added | Andy Putman | @GerhardPaseman: I'm not unwilling to talk to other specialists (after all, isn't that what MO is about?). I'm just skeptical of the value of your suggested answer -- the OP's question makes it clear that they already know about cohomology rings, so it won't help them. It would make more sense as an answer to a different sort of question. To put it another way: I think of MO as a place to give crisp and precise answers to questions that are asked, not as a place for free-flowing mathematical chit-chat. | |
| Sep 3, 2018 at 19:52 | comment | added | Gerhard Paseman | That's why I recommend an additional answer. Then again, our targets seem different. Gerhard "Will Talk To Other Nonspecialists" Paseman, 2018.09.03. | |
| Sep 3, 2018 at 19:29 | comment | added | Andy Putman | @GerhardPaseman: It would be kind of absurd to insert a discussion of what a cohomology ring is in a question like the one I answered (and once one knows the definitions, the question is natural enough that I don't think it needs further elaboration). Indeed, I think this would add negative value: it would make it harder for an expert to parse things and find a quick crisp answer, and the question at hand is technical enough that someone trying to learn what a cohomology ring was would be unlikely to stumble across an answer that somehow ended up there. | |
| Sep 3, 2018 at 19:25 | comment | added | Andy Putman | @MartinSleziak: I am totally fine with links to legitimate sources for a paper (e.g. an author's website, the arXiv, or a journals's website), and I'll include them if I have them easily accessible. But what I don't want are links to sketchy collections of papers (e.g. researchgate or academia.edu). | |
| Sep 3, 2018 at 19:22 | comment | added | Andy Putman | @ToddTrimble: What I don't want to see are links to weird pirate websites, or an insistence on answers that only reference freely available sources. My own take is that one should cite papers/books on MO for the same reasons that you cite them in a paper (that is, for purely intellectual reasons, e.g. citing the original source of a result or a particularly elegant exposition of it). There is an unfortunate intellectual laziness I often see among young people, who refuse to come to grips with the parts of the literature that they can't read on their screen. | |
| Sep 3, 2018 at 18:13 | comment | added | Gerhard Paseman | ACK! I just noticed spellcheck struck again. Sorry for the typo, Professor Putman. Gerhard "From One 'Man' To Another" Paseman, 2018.09.03. | |
| Sep 3, 2018 at 17:58 | comment | added | Martin Sleziak | Reference to the paper in question is certainly needed (or at least the author's name and the title). But including a link is a nice addition - as discussed before: Is it worth editing old posts to add links for references? | |
| Sep 3, 2018 at 17:55 | comment | added | Gerhard Paseman | Also, while I am grateful (see my comment to the question) for an answer like the example you give, I would be happier with an adjunct answer that starts out like "Expanding on Andy Putnam's answer, here is what the Kan-Thurston theorem means in this context...", and continues in such a way that I gain not only a sense of what a cohomology ring is, but why one would ask the question in the first place. Thank you Andy in any case for your contributions. Gerhard "See You In St. Petersburg?" Paseman, 2018.09.03. | |
| Sep 3, 2018 at 17:46 | comment | added | Gerhard Paseman | What Todd said about exclusionary. Also, I think the target audience should not be professional mathematicians and graduate students (and assume the environment they live in as available to all); I think the target audience should be everyone who is willing to talk with professional mathematicians and graduate students on something close to the latter's level and terms, including former graduate students, former professional mathematicians, researchers and workers in other fields, and people who like their amateur status. Gerhard "In Short, For Almost Everyone" Paseman, 2018.09.03. | |
| Sep 3, 2018 at 17:41 | comment | added | Todd Trimble Mod | By the way, I think the answer you linked to is highly appropriate. You stated the theorem precisely, and gave the link. To me, that is perfectly adequate. | |
| Sep 3, 2018 at 17:39 | comment | added | Todd Trimble Mod | Well, I'm not officially in academe, so I guess that makes me an amateur. I also have to make a 30 minute trip to get to a decent university library. I do have ways to get at a pretty large amount of literature, but I'd rather avoid having MO be exclusionary to people in my situation. | |
| Sep 3, 2018 at 15:41 | history | answered | Andy Putman | CC BY-SA 4.0 |