Posted by: Anonymous Coward
on September 14, 2006 12:01 PM
Two points:
(1) Science used to be an open process. Now days most peer-review journals require hefty subscription fees (unless you have access to a university or research institute that subscribes for you). The result, quite a lot of research is published without knowledge of other relevant work.... And nearly all the ones who can look at such papers, are researchers and not engineers and others who might make use of it. Granted, this is true more or less depending on the field.
(2) A huge number of other scientific software is FOSS. The R project (as mentioned by another post) is an excellent statistical analysis and graphing language so you don't need to pay big annual fees for SPSS, SAS, S+, etc. Neuron and Genesis are excellent neuron simulators (neural net algorithms are not accurate simulations).
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Science Not So Open These Days
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on September 14, 2006 12:01 PM(1) Science used to be an open process. Now days most peer-review journals require hefty subscription fees (unless you have access to a university or research institute that subscribes for you). The result, quite a lot of research is published without knowledge of other relevant work.... And nearly all the ones who can look at such papers, are researchers and not engineers and others who might make use of it. Granted, this is true more or less depending on the field.
(2) A huge number of other scientific software is FOSS. The R project (as mentioned by another post) is an excellent statistical analysis and graphing language so you don't need to pay big annual fees for SPSS, SAS, S+, etc. Neuron and Genesis are excellent neuron simulators (neural net algorithms are not accurate simulations).
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