20080125

Arbitrary Decisions

Back from San Fran, of which some later, to find another pile of random people in my inbox asking me to do things for them for free. Top of these was a review request for an uninspiring looking paper from some generic sounding journal that I've never heard of. I'm probably too committed with other stuff to bother with it, but it would be nice to have some other reasons to reject the request. The journal seems to be published by Elsevier, whom I vaguely recall being painted as evil. But some quasi research on Wikipedia shows that they seem to be cleaning up their act, at least as far as the arms fairs seem to be concerned.

Then I looked up some more details on the journal in question, and noticed that the subscription rate is close on $2000 a year. This should be compared to the rather meager in comparison TODS (with its excellent choice in papers) for as little as $30, and TKDE which is at most $80. So I think from now on, I'll prioritize such requests based on accessibility of the final results.

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