Well here we go again, you know the drill. Global warming at fault, other possibilities ignored, multiple press releases. Lake Tanganyika is the second largest lake in the world for fresh water, so naturally any change it is cause for “alarm”. Unfortunately in these press releases there is no mention of a possible increase in turbidity due to human action on and around the lake, decreasing the albedo to absorb more sunlight on the lake surface, warming it. At least somebody has already asked that question previously in peer reviewed literature where they describe the Lake Tanganyika problem as “watershed deforestation, road building, and other anthropogenic activities result in sediment inundation…“.
But in our current press releases, there is this hat tip to anthropogenic: “The team attributes the lake’s increased temperature and the decreased productivity during the 20th century to human-caused global warming.”
First from Brown University:
Brown Geologists Show Unprecedented Warming in Lake Tanganyika
PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Lake Tanganyika, the second oldest and the second-deepest lake in the world, could be in for some rough waters.
Geologists led by Brown University have determined the east African rift lake has experienced unprecedented warming during the last century, and its surface waters are the warmest on record. That finding is important, the scientists write in the journal Nature Geoscience, because the warm surface waters likely will affect fish stocks upon which millions of people in the region depend.
The team took core samples from the lakebed that laid out a 1,500-year history of the lake’s surface temperature. The data showed the lake’s surface temperature, 26 degrees Celsius (78.8°F), last measured in 2003, is the warmest the lake has been for a millennium and a half. The team also documented that Lake Tanganyika experienced its biggest temperature change in the 20th century, which has affected its unique ecosystem that relies upon the natural conveyance of nutrients from the depths to jumpstart the food chain upon which the fish survive.
“Our data show a consistent relationship between lake surface temperature and productivity (such as fish stocks),” said Jessica Tierney, a Brown graduate student who this spring earned her Ph.D. and is the paper’s lead author. “As the lake gets warmer, we expect productivity to decline, and we expect that it will affect the [fishing] industry.”
The research grew out of two coring expeditions sponsored by the Nyanza Project in 2001 and 2004. Cores were taken by Andrew Cohen, professor of geological sciences at the University of Arizona and director of the Nyanza project, and James Russell, professor of geological sciences at Brown, who is also Tierney’s adviser.
Lake Tanganyika is bordered by Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Tanzania, and Zambia — four of the poorest countries in the world, according to the United Nations Human Development Index. An estimated 10 million people live near the lake, and they depend upon it for drinking water and for food. Fishing is a crucial component for the region’s diet and livelihood: Up to 200,000 tons of sardines and four other fish species are harvested annually from Lake Tanganyika, a haul that makes up a significant portion of local residents’ diets, according to a 2001 report by the Lake Tanganyika Biodiversity Project.
Lake Tanganyika, one of the richest freshwater ecosystems in the world, is divided into two general levels. Most of the animal species live in the upper 100 meters, including the valuable sardines. Below that, the lake holds less and less oxygen, and at certain depths, it is anoxic, meaning it has no oxygen at all. What this all means is the lake is highly stratified and depends on wind to churn the waters and send nutrients from the depths toward the surface as food for algae, which supports the entire food web of the lake. But as Lake Tanganyika warms, the mixing of waters is lessened, the scientists find, meaning less nutrients are funneled from the depths toward the surface. Worse, more warming at the surface magnifies the difference in density between the two levels; even more wind is needed to churn the waters enough to ferry the nutrients toward the fish-dwelling upper layer.
The researchers’ data show that during the last 1,500 years, intervals of prolonged warming and cooling are linked with low and high algal productivity, respectively, indicating a clear link between past temperature changes and biological productivity in the lake.
“The people throughout southcentral Africa depend on the fish from Lake Tanganyika as a crucial source of protein,” noted Cohen, an author on the paper. “This resource is likely threatened by the lake’s unprecedented warming since the late 19th century and the associated loss of lake productivity.”
Climate change models show a general warming in the region, which, if accurate, would cause even greater warming of the Lake Tanganyika’s surface waters and more stratification in the lake as a whole. “So, as you move forward, you can imagine that density gradient increasing,” said Russell, an author on the paper.
Some researchers have posited that the declining fish stocks in Lake Tanganyika can be attributed mainly to overfishing, and Tierney and Russell say that may be a reason. But they note that the warming in the lake, and the lessened mixing of critical nutrients is exacerbating the stocks’ decline, if not causing it in the first place. “It’s almost impossible for it not to,” Russell said.
Other authors on the paper are Brown graduates Marc Mayes and Natacha Meyer; Christopher Johnson at the University of California, Los Angeles; and Peter Swarzenski, with the United States Geological Survey. The National Science Foundation and the Nyanza Project funded the research.
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Here is the University of Arizona version
=======================================
Twentieth-Century Warming in Lake Tanganyika is Unprecedented
Warming in the last century threatens one of Africa’s largest inland fisheries.
Lake Tanganyika’s surface waters are warmer than at any time in the previous 1,500 years, a University of Arizona researcher and his colleagues report online in Nature Geoscience.
The rise in temperature during the 20th century is driving a decline in the productivity of the lake, which hosts the second-largest inland fishery in Africa.
“People throughout south-central Africa depend on the fish from Lake Tanganyika as a crucial source of protein,” said study co-author Andrew S. Cohen, a UA professor of geosciences. “This resource is likely threatened by the lake’s unprecedented warming since the late 19th century and the associated loss of lake productivity.”
This is the first detailed record of temperature and its impacts on a tropical African ecosystem that allows scientists to compare the last 100 years with the previous 1,400 years, Cohen said.
The team attributes the lake’s increased temperature and the decreased productivity during the 20th century to human-caused global warming.
“We’ve got a global phenomenon driving something local that has a huge potential impact on the people that live in the region and on the animals that live in the lake,” he said.
The annual catch of the Lake Tanganyika fishery is estimated at about 198,000 tons per year, more than 20 times greater than the U.S. commercial fishery in the Great Lakes, he said. The nations of Burundi, Tanzania, Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo border the lake, which is the longest lake in the world and the second deepest.
The surface waters of Lake Tanganyika are the most biologically productive part of the lake. For the 1,400 years before 1900, those waters were no warmer than 75.7 F (24.3 degrees C). Since 1900, the lake’s surface waters warmed 3 degrees F, reaching 78.8 degrees F (26 degrees C) in 2003, the date of the researchers’ last measurement.
The researchers used sediment cores from the lake bed to reconstruct the 1,500-year history of the lake. The scientists analyzed the cores for chemicals produced by microbes and left in the sediments to determine the lake’s past temperature and productivity.
Because sediment is deposited in the lake in annual layers, the cores provide a detailed record of Lake Tanganyika’s past temperatures and productivity and of the regional wildfires.
The instrument record of lake temperatures from the 20th century agrees with the temperature analyses from the cores, Cohen said.
The cores were extracted as part of the UA’s Nyanza Project, a research training program that brought together U.S. and African scientists and students to study tropical lakes. The National Science Foundation funded the project.
“A big part of our mandate for the Nyanza Project was looking at the interconnectivity between climate, human activity, resources and biodiversity,” said Cohen, who directed the multi-year project.
Lake Tanganyika and similar tropical lakes are divided into two general levels. Most of the fish and other organisms live in the upper 300 feet (about 100 meters). At depths below that, the lake waters contain less and less oxygen. Below approximately 600 feet, the lake water, although nutrient-rich, has no oxygen and fish cannot live there.
During the region’s windy season, the winds make the lake’s surface waters slosh back and forth, mixing some of the deep water with the upper layers. This annual mixing resupplies the lake’s food web with nutrients and drives the lake’s productivity cycle, Cohen said.
However, as Lake Tanganyika warms, the upper waters of the lake become less dense. Therefore, stronger winds are required to churn the lake waters enough to mix the deeper waters with the upper layer. As a result, the upper layers of the lake are becoming increasingly nutrient-poor, reducing the lake’s productivity.
In addition, warmer water contains less dissolved oxygen, reducing the quality of the habitat for some fish species.
Other lakes in Africa are showing similar effects to those the team found in Lake Tanganyika, he said.
The finding has implications for lakes in more temperate climates.
“Increasingly, lakes in the U.S. are warming and they’re behaving more like these African lakes,” Cohen said. “There’s a potential for learning a lot about where we’re going by seeing where those lakes already are.”
The team’s article, “Late twentieth-century warming in Lake Tanganyika unprecedented since AD 500,” will be published in the June issue of Nature Geoscience.
Cohen’s co-authors on the paper are first author Jessica E. Tierney of Brown University in Providence, R.I.; Marc T. Mayes, Natacha Meyer and James M. Russell, also at Brown University; Christopher Johnson, a former University of Arizona student now at the University of California, Los Angeles; and Peter W. Swarzenski of the U.S. Geological Survey in Santa Cruz, Calif. The National Science Foundation funded the research.
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Ah-Ha!!! The missing heat!!! Found it at last!
It seems that Lake Tanganyika is eutrophyic in addition to accomodating increased infusions of sediments. The sources of phosphate and nitrate infusions need to be found and mitigated. Otherwise the dead zone will continue to expand upwards. The algae blooms that cause the eutrophy must also be one of the causes of increased water temperatures.
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Nigel Harris chides those who comment here for not wanting to cough up $18 to Nature Geoscience to read through the single letter which is the source of this AGW propaganda puffery, and gripes at me for observing that “measuring only surface temperatures tells you nothing about total heat accumulation” in a body of water.
Nigel, dear boy, have you downloaded a PDF of that letter for your own close examination? The supplementary information on this letter is freely available from Nature Geoscience (see http://tinyurl.com/27tfgx3 ), and if the references listed therein are the only references cited in the letter itself, I take this as a strong indication that the investigators participating in this study indeed did not assess temperatures of the lake’s waters even at the points where they took the two core samples (MC1 and KH1) discussed in that supplementary information.
I have also wondered why the hell the authors of this letter seem not to have taken into full consideration other actors in the ecology of the Lake Tanganyika area which the average biologist would immediately appreciate as powerful confounding factors in any quest to use changes in sediments and/or surface waters as validation of the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis (which, remember, attributes a putative acceleration of the slow and rather steady rebound in global average temperatures since the close of the Little Ice Age ca. 1850 to increases in atmospheric CO2 concentrations as the result of fossil fuels combustion, and advances the claim that reduction in such CO2 releases as the result of purposeful human action can reverse this so-called “catastrophic” trend).
Are there indications that Tierney et al (or the referees reviewing this letter) had some thoughts about the ways in which processes other than AGW could account for the physical findings they observed? Is there any indication that they made reference to (or conducted en passant) such simple observations of surface water turbidity, chemical composition, microflora, and suspended particulates as would occur instantly to anybody with a bachelor’s degree in biology?
Paleolimnology is all well and good, but what settles down there on the bottom tends (with the exception of human artifacts like the hulk of the Hedwig) to be the result of activity in the biosphere above, both in the lake itself and in the tributary streams contributing thereunto.
Given that part of what the AGW alarmists are whining about in their propaganda pivoting on this letter is the reduction of productivity in Lake Tanganyika’s fisheries – which they immediately and loudly trumpet as proof of man-made global warming – I find that a failure to look at other easily discerned and much more immediately efficacious mechanisms as principal causes of reduced fish catches glares.
Don’t you, Nigel?
Hm. Nigel, have you any experience of academic publishing in the sciences? I do. I’ve even participated in the process which is known as “baloney-slicing,” the careful and parsimonious utilization of investigational data to maximize the number of publications (and the impact factor of each such publication) to be derived from time, effort, and funds invested in a particular study.
I have therefore some proximal professional insight into what this letter of Tierney et al represents in the scheme of things up at Brown University’s department of geology as well as how it fits into the confabulations of the AGW cabal.
I don’t think you, do, Nigel. But what the hell. Have you given Nature Geoscience your VISA account number and downloaded a PDF of this letter?
If so, would you please tell us what you’ve found?
For my own part, I’ve passed along to Dr. Lindzen at MIT the Web addresses of the letter itself and the supplementary information so that he might review it, or consult with one of his colleagues up there about it, as he might elect.
But I no more intend to cough up cash for a copy of this letter than I expect Dr. Tierney to plunk down Federal Reserve notes for access to something from The Journal of Virology or Gastroenterology.
Clinical medicine is not her field, and geology is not mine. But scientific method is uniformly applicable in both, and it is not only possible but inevitable that people trained and experienced in disciplines other than that of Dr. Tierney and her colleagues will examine the work they make public, cock an eyebrow, and say:
“Something reeks about this.”
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Nigel Harris says:
May 19, 2010 at 7:11 am
it’s clearly impossible [implies Pat Moffit’s rhetorical question] to say anything about historical surface temperatures from core samples taken from the bottom of a lake
Read what I wrote- I am skeptical but I asked a question. Perhaps you can tell me how a sediment core from over 570m below the surface of the lake can be calibrated to show a change in surface temperature of 1.7C.
And if scientists stopped using media as a propaganda tool before anyone has had a chance to read the paper or do a review we wouldn’t have had this little spat.
Seems to me that an ill thought out press release can do a lot of harm to your reputation as a scientist (assuming you have/want one).
Milwaukee Bob,
I didn’t accuse anyone of being dumber than dumb. If you read what I wrote, I was (ironically) accusing the scientists who did the research of being dumb for not having realized that their research was pointless because of all the facts that I listed that are apparently self-evident to WUWT posters. All I’m accusing WUWT posters of is rushing to judgement without actually bothering to read the paper (or letter) in question.
Although, now I think of it, “dumber than dumb” is a pretty good description of some of the comments appearing above, so it is understandable that you thought that’s what I meant. That is, of course, what I think. I’m going to have to try to find another site where I can find genuine, scientific scepticism about AGW, not uninformed knee-jerk condemnation of other peoples’ work.
Nigel Harris says:
May 19, 2010 at 7:11 am
Why didn’t they think to come here first and find out all the real answers? Would have saved them all that heat and those flies in Africa.
They aren’t interested in real answers (~snip~). They already “know” that the warming of the surface , and all the other problems mentioned is due to “manmade warming”, and that it will therefor just keep getting worse. The manmade warming bogeyman saves them the work of looking for other possible causes.
Pat Moffitt,
I realise you asked a question, and it is possible that you were perfectly genuinely seeking knowledge. But if so, why not do some research yourself? The summary of the letter, which is available at nature.com (link in Rich Matarese’s comment above) mentions that they use the TEX86 temperature proxy. It is easy to learn about how that works, at least in principle, online. There’s even a short Wikipedia page on it, but you can access several original papers in full, on Google Scholar, for instance. In 5 minutes research, I have learned that some phytoplankton respond to temperature changes (at/near the surface where they live) by changing the chemical composition of their membranes. When they die, they sink to the bottom and become part of the sediment. The membrane components are preserved, so by analysing the chemical composition of the resulting sediment at the bottom of the lake, you can build up a historical temperature profile of what was happening at the surface of the lake.
Now I apologise if I have done you a disservice by interpreting your question as a statement of disbelief. However, this is a very common rhetorical trick used on these sorts of blogs to inject uncertainty and doubt where there is no reason for it. I (maybe wrongly) suspected you were asking the question to ridicule the authors of the work, rather than in a genuine pursuit of knowledge, for the simple reason that if you really wanted to know, you could have found out for yourself in less time than it took to write your comment.
Anthony Watts said “Unfortunately in these press releases there is no mention of a possible increase in turbidity due to human action on and around the lake, decreasing the albedo to absorb more sunlight on the lake surface, warming it.”
Here is the abstract to the article. Unfortunately I cannot access the full article because my university’s library does not have a subscription due to (I assume) budget cuts in recent years.
(Bruce already posted it.)
http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/ngeo865.html
I did find this. The Nyanza Project helped fund the study. This was from their website:
“In recent years Lake Tanganyika, like many other large lakes of the world, has begun to feel the effects of a variety of human impacts, including fishing pressures, an increased rate of sediment accumulation along rocky coasts caused by deforestation and soil erosion in the lake’s watersheds, and climate change.”
http://www.geo.arizona.edu/nyanza/study.html
Thus, it is very likely the researchers were aware of the issues Anthony raised, although I have no idea how they handled it. Press releases are not likely to be complete.
It is unfortunate that access to journal articles is so difficult. In my field, mathematics, we post preprints for free before articles even come out. Journals are viewed mainly as final repositories. Physics is the same. I do not know why other fields do not do this.
—
Tim Clark (at 8:24 AM) had pulled a pair of paragraphs without attribution, and it would be appropriate to spot the citation, which is a one-page online article titled “Lake Tanganyika and the Tanganyika cichlids” at http://tinyurl.com/24az8ak
A more reliable citation would be appreciated, particularly with regard to the assertion that there is significant “…volcanic activity near the bottom of the lake” which so affects the heat content of these waters that “The temperature at the bottom of Lake Tanganyika has been measured and turned out to differ no more than 5 degrees F from the surface temperature.”
This is (to use the phrase made famous by Hairplug Joe, our brain-damaged Vice President) “a big [copulating] deal,” and warrants a great deal more focused consideration.
As I had previously recounted here, I have gotten spew from warmist fellahin to the effect that there is no real and appreciable contribution of vulcanism to the temperatures recorded in the waters of Lake Tanganyika, meaning that whatever heat is imparted to that puddle must come from deadly, evil, “only-Man-is-vile” anthropogenic atmospheric warming.
Anybody else got anything on magmatic cookery at the bottom of Lake Tanganyika? If so, now would be a good time to get it out here.
—
.
Nigel Harris says:
May 19, 2010 at 10:34 am
I’m going to have to try to find another site where I can find genuine, scientific scepticism about AGW, not uninformed knee-jerk condemnation of other peoples’ work.
You won’t find believers here, we are just doubters, we do not kneel before any Holy Climate Prophet.
A question some have hinted at: How has the population grown around this lake in the past 100 years? A fishery for thousands of years, perhaps, but how many catchers of fish? And what of pollution, runoff and the like?
Seeing the specks and not the logs.
There is too much anger in the Green Church believers, so I would suggest to decriminalize pot to calm them down.
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Mike laments:
“It is unfortunate that access to journal articles is so difficult. In my field, mathematics, we post preprints for free before articles even come out. Journals are viewed mainly as final repositories. Physics is the same. I do not know why other fields do not do this.”
The one-word answer, Mike, is publishers. The publishing companies which have established something close to an oligopoly in academic periodicals are determined to wring every last centavo from their “intellectual properties,” and those of us in the medical field regularly damn Elsevier, Wolters Kluwer, et alia for the costs they impose upon practicing clinicians without academic affiliations (and therefore lawful online access through libraries’ subscriptions) to full-text information they hold more closely than Disney guards Mickey Mouse.
A great many medical journals will permit unpaid access to their contents after six months to a year of proprietary “hold,” and others do so immediately as they decide to publish. See http://www.freemedicaljournals.com/ for some insight into what is and is not denied to the non-subscriber in the field of health care.
Many of the publishers, however, will never permit free distribution of content except when such access is given as a “sample” or when a supporter subsidizes such access as a sort of na levo marketing ploy to tout the results of something like a particularly advantageous clinical trials report.
An article can be literally fifty years old (or older) and a company like Elsevier will demand cash up front before a speckled and ratty PDF scan of the original pages can be lawfully downloaded from their Web site.
It’s stuff like this that gives me cause to foster sympathy with author Cory Doctorow and the other advocates of rationalizing intellectual property rights.
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Billy Liar said (May 19, 2010 at 10:28 am): “Seems to me that an ill thought out press release can do a lot of harm to your reputation as a scientist (assuming you have/want one).”
Good point. You might be interested in this.
How not to write a press release – gavin @ur momisugly 21 April 2006:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2006/04/how-not-to-write-a-press-release/
“Nigel Harris says:
May 19, 2010 at 10:34 am
……..I’m going to have to try to find another site where I can find genuine, scientific scepticism about AGW, not uninformed knee-jerk condemnation of other peoples’ work.”
Don’t leave. Stay a while and change our ways. We aren’t zealots, just critical thinkers. And yes we do read papers when we need to but as they all conclude with ‘it’s AGW’ it gets a bit boring. I think what many of us are objecting to is the press release and alarmism not the subtleties of the paper. Does it matter what the paper says. Perception is truth.
We object to the way the science is communicated.
cheers David
cheers David
cheers David
Oops, 3 cheers for Nigel 🙂
I seem to remember Tanganyika having a deleterious affect from the introduced fish, Lates niloticus. I have not kept up as the rift lakes, though incredibly fascinating and unique, are not a current interest of mine, so my knowledge is a bit dated. I am not convinced that this is a real issue (e.g.. was originally promoted to make Mankind look evil because of dams). Lake T has its own Lates, i.e. L. angustifrons. I have personal experience keeping L. calcarifer. All of these guys are pretty similar. Mine consumed a lot of food.
Nigel-
I did check out the homepage for TEX86 proxies which is why I wrote the question -How can they claim to see a 0.9C increase. Take a look at their correlation with sea surface temperatures http://members.quicknet.nl/ellenstefan/index_files/Page365.htm and tell me how the authors of this paper can claim sensitivity to 0.9C over a very abbreviated temperature range. Also note the caution on the TEX86 site that it is an “empirical correlation and many questions remain unanswered”
You should also be aware that many of the Lake’s bays are eutrophic while the open waters seem to becoming more oligotrophic. One can as a result have two different temperature trends as a result of the differential heating in the presence of organic or inorganic particulates.
Also take a look at the variability of of the lake vertical temperature distribution http://www.ilec.or.jp/database/afr/afr-06.html which also raised my concern of a 0.9C. It is also the reason for my reaction to their reliance on only two or three core samples.
I have done a fair amount of investigation on the problems with the latid and clupeid fishery (sociological and ecological) in both Lakes Victoria and Tanganyika- outside this scope. There are any number of pressing problems with these fisheries and the impacts are potentially large to the local human population. For the researchers to “imply” that CO2 induced temperature changes represents a significant concern for the lake or the residents is wrong on too many levels. The residents of Lake Tanganyika’s shores are unfortunately facing far more pressing near term threats to survival– and any chance we had to “fix” these problems of overfishing, deforestation (fire wood), pollution, habitat loss, agriculture run off, civil war, etc are now diminished because the tool set has been restricted to CO2 reduction. A good test would be checking back in a year and see where aid and research money was spent– addressing the region’s “problems”.
Remember it is actually wind that causes the upwelling (the density difference related to T being quite small) and as such these researchers have to make some serious leaps in correlating wind speed with temperature to make the nutrient links.
“If” the problem is actually some reduction in productivity as a result of nutrient deficiency — then the answer is pretty simple- add fertilizer. The efficacy of this is quite well know and has been researched and demonstrated extensively with salmon populations (replacement of decaying salmon nutrients -MDN- lost to high seas commercial fishing with commercial fertilizer causing an increase in salmon production of 3 to 5X the baseline) as well as with warm water fish populations.
I would have had less of a reaction had these researchers mentioned the fact that nutrient addition would cause an immediate increase in the lake’s food production and the well being of the resident human population– whether or not climate change is real. Failing to tell the media that an easy nutrient fix is available or how CO2 ranks with the other problems faced in this region-in my view is unethical and immoral.
Mike says:
May 19, 2010 at 10:54 am
It is unfortunate that access to journal articles is so difficult. In my field, mathematics, we post preprints for free before articles even come out. Journals are viewed mainly as final repositories. Physics is the same. I do not know why other fields do not do this.
Yes, scientific papers should not be behind paywalls on the Internet – having them published on paper and sold for exorbitant prices to University libraries is probably holding back the progress of science, if only a little (although the Journals argue this pays for the peer-review process, and they are doing a service). It looks like there is movement towards free access to published papers on the Web, even if only after 12 months
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/03/openmit/
For instance, the NIH now (since 2008) requires NIH funded research papers to be made public 12 months after publication. As the person who spearheaded the MIT open access policy said: “Who actually should be controlling the scholarly record? Universities have a mission that has something to do with producing and disseminating knowledge. These publishers, whatever their good intentions may be, have a mission to make money for their stockholders. The system is a little out of whack.” Open access advocates say the current scientific publishing paradigm is broken because publishers control the scientific record, not academics.
Nigel Harris, sorry IF I mistook your intent….. But you now say: Although, now I think of it, “dumber than dumb” is a pretty good description of some of the comments appearing above, so it is understandable that you thought that’s what I meant. That is, of course, what I think. so your saying when you first listed them you thought they were ALL valid and dare I say “thoughtful” comments the scientist should have thought “about” BUT NOW you think SOME of them are dumb (what does THAT say about you?) – – but not all – – and because not ALL of them are stimulating scientific points – – your going to go find a “better scientific website” with no knee-jerking? Well, lots of luck with that and don’t let the cyber door….. Well, never mind, that’s not my call.
Rich Matarese said (May 19, 2010 at 11:31 am):
“The one-word answer, Mike, is publishers. The publishing companies which have established something close to an oligopoly in academic periodicals are determined to wring every last centavo from their “intellectual properties,” and those of us in the medical field regularly damn Elsevier, …”
I know, I know. But we in math refused in mass to let them get away with it. I always post my articles regardless of the copyright terms the journal has. We all (in math) do this. They never touched us. We closed down one Elsevier journal when it wouldn’t lower its price to libraries. (http://www.ams.org/notices/200007/forum-birman.pdf) Also, Nature is not a for profit group. Why are they blocking access? And JSTOR, why do they block access? Maybe they could limit advanced search features to subscribers so libraries would keep paying. Someone does have to pay.
Anu: Good to know that about NIH. Maybe NSF and DOE will follow. But a one year delay still limits public discuss. Reporters and bloggers should not be limited to relying on press releases.
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Anu writes of how “…the Journals argue this [charging big bucks for access to individual articles in their archives] pays for the peer-review process….”
Hm? I’ve done peer review for academic journals. I got nothing for my time and trouble except a pro forma “Thanks, Doc!” and a listing way to hellangone down the masthead as a halfway-honorary member of the editorial staff.
I suppose some guys like sticking such mentions in their curricula vitae, but how the devil does it cost a journal anything in terms of real resources (especially these days, when everything is conducted by e-mail, and the manuscripts come to reviewers as digital file attachments) to conduct peer review?
Anybody else have experience in the peer review process? Has anyone ever gotten paid to do this kind of work?
—
I never get paid to review articles. Textbooks companies have paid me to review drafts of their books on two occasions.
One point about access to journals. Public universities in the U.S. will allow state residents to purchase library cards for a modest fee. I would assume that this would include an access code for their e-journal subscriptions. Those of you who aren’t academics should be able to get access this way. I would encourage you to do so. As a state resident your taxes pay for these journal subscriptions.
The cavalcade of published papers based on underdone research continues to amaze me, indicating the peer review process, for a few journals at least, has run off the rails.
This paper a classic case in point. It reads like a research proposal, putting forward a hypothesis, but the data presented at this point in time is hardly compelling being insufficient to prove the point and thus hardly deserving of publication.
The sad thing is that the junior researchers involved will go away believing this is how science is done!
I wonder if the authors are brave enough to comment.