If he gets the data through Elsevier’s system, he isn’t really anonymous. And if he wants to do the particular project of this post, he has to get images, which he can’t do just by clicking “agree,” but he would have to tell them what he was going to do with the images. What’s going to happen is that people are going to pirate all journal articles, largely for other reasons. At that point, he can do his project; I don’t know whether anonymously. But this is a delay and a lot of wasted effort duplicating existing databases and query infrastructure.
Ordinarily, publishing things grants you rewards on the order of the global significance of your work, as measured by its impact on the world of scientific papers. Should he be able to reap greater rewards by targeting the measure instead? (As the GM of a real world science game, I’d allow it, cause it’s a neat idea. But if we actually try to refer to the global significance of your work...) This copyright stuff, evil as it may be in the general case, does seem to avert this kind of going meta.
Of course, the real solution in this case is for him to anonymously publish that list of errors along with a hash value whose input he keeps to himself until legislation would have allowed him to non-anonymously publish the list. Optimal number of future citations (even better than if he simply waited for the legislation!) and optimal actual betterment of the world.
Couldn’t he just publish the lists of errors anonymously?
If he gets the data through Elsevier’s system, he isn’t really anonymous. And if he wants to do the particular project of this post, he has to get images, which he can’t do just by clicking “agree,” but he would have to tell them what he was going to do with the images. What’s going to happen is that people are going to pirate all journal articles, largely for other reasons. At that point, he can do his project; I don’t know whether anonymously. But this is a delay and a lot of wasted effort duplicating existing databases and query infrastructure.
Probably yes. But that would be throwing away thousands of future citations—the currency which these days determines how good a scientist is. :(
Ordinarily, publishing things grants you rewards on the order of the global significance of your work, as measured by its impact on the world of scientific papers. Should he be able to reap greater rewards by targeting the measure instead? (As the GM of a real world science game, I’d allow it, cause it’s a neat idea. But if we actually try to refer to the global significance of your work...) This copyright stuff, evil as it may be in the general case, does seem to avert this kind of going meta.
Of course, the real solution in this case is for him to anonymously publish that list of errors along with a hash value whose input he keeps to himself until legislation would have allowed him to non-anonymously publish the list. Optimal number of future citations (even better than if he simply waited for the legislation!) and optimal actual betterment of the world.