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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 19th, 2023

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  • A problem with Wikipedia is that experts are not allowed to contribute to their areas of expertise because they’re “biased” (see edit below). I know a professor at a top university who used to spend his free time editing Wikipedia outside of his specific area but in his broad area of expertise as a method of disseminating science knowledge to the public. When the higher-up Wikipedia editors found out who he was, they banned his account and IP from editing.

    Having the lay public write articles works when expertise isn’t required to understand something, but much of Wikipedia around science is slightly inaccurate at best. (This is still true, probably owing to the neutral point of view rule [giving weight to fringe ideas as a result] or the secondary source prioritization over primary sources.)

    Edit: current Wikipedia editing rules and guidelines would not support this ban, so things appear to have changed. Wikipedia still recommends against primary sources as authoritative sources of information (recommending secondary sources instead), which is not great. But, they explicitly now welcome subject matter experts as editors.


  • Any NIH-funded research must be made open access one year after its publication date. NIH publishes the accepted manuscript in PubMed at the one-year mark. Unlike NIH, (last I checked) NSF doesn’t strictly require it, but you won’t be getting NSF funding unless you say you’re going to make the resulting papers freely available somehow (e.g., preprints, paying for open access, etc.). Not sure about DOE/DOD/etc. funded-articles.

    The majority of federally funded research in the US is made open access. You might not realize it because news outlets typically report on brand-new articles, which haven’t hit the one-year mark for open access yet.