davidblair

Deposits have been restricted at this time, not withdrawals.

Perception is far more important than reality.

When online sales first took off, credit card theft was a huge concern. Even though nothing would go wrong for the vast majority of people fear was enough to make users and vendors go to great lengths to protect data. Not a perfect analogy but conceptually similar.

The reason Blackboard doesn't have competition is due to the patents they hold. They have made a commitment not to sue free, open source projects, but as soon as you start charging money they are ready to protect their IP rights.

The FCC strictly prohibits this I believe.

I've never run into this issue and have booked many tickets (on the northeast line).

The app still works as of 8:00 PM ET on my AT&T iPhone.

Based on what I've read about others tethering apps, Apple will not remotely disable Tether.

The only major downside is that I will never see any updates. It's only a matter of time before an OS upgrade breaks the app permanently.

I phrased that poorly. You are absolutely right, peer reviewers are unpaid.

I also have a big problem with the fact that journals receive a perpetual copyright to the work instead of it becoming an open license 6-months to a year after publication.

Returning to the cost issue. The cost I am referring to comes from paying for the software to manage the peer review process and the time it takes to build the relationships to have enough reviewers available to deal with the first submission and the revision that will almost likely occur.

To put out a single issue with 20 articles can easily involve 50 reviewers and at least 40 authors.

It is the social science and humanities journals that have real problems with getting papers ready for print. It's easy to only think about scientific journals but the reality is a great deal of researchers only have sufficient computer skills. They will write a professional paper and do the best they can to format it but it isn't anywhere near ready to send to the printers.

Large journals can easily cover these costs. Small journals are really struggling to get by. I hear small journal editors talking about how long they will be able to survive. They want to make it work but just don't know how.

It's not an easy problem to solve.

arxiv.org has >700,000 open access articles in Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Quantitative Biology, Quantitative Finance and Statistics. It's a great resource.

The major cost of a journal is the peer review process, editing, and printing. This can really take a substantial portion of someones time. I don't think it justifies a $25 (sometimes over $40) fee to see an article printed 8 years ago though.

I have seen substantial Federal grants that restrict overhead a university can take to ~20%. These grants were tied to the PI and the money follows the PI if they change institutions.