Bayesian Inductive Inference and the Anthropic Cosmological Principle

Many moons ago I wrote a paper with a person called Anthony J.M. Garrett with the title Bayesian Inductive Inference and the Anthropic Cosmological Principle; the full reference is A.J.M. Garrett and P. Coles, Comments on Astrophysics 17(1) 23-47 (1993). It got a few citations here and there, and has been discussed in a few books and other texts. In 1999, the journal Comments on Astrophysics was merged with some other journals to form Comments on Modern Physics which was then acquired by publishers Taylor and Francis in 2001, when it took over Gordon and Breach. The new publisher never put the old papers online in digital format. Most of the back catalogue of Comments on Astrophysics is indexed in NASA/ADS (bibstem: ComAp), but No. 1 of Volume 17 is not there. That classic paper is not, as far as I know, available anywhere on the internet. Or at least it wasn’t until now.

I was recently asked for a PDF of the paper so I made a scan and sent it. Now that I have a scan, however, and WordPress now has a PDF upload gadget, I thought I’d put it up here. I did a Google search for it earlier this evening and the AI Summary described the paper as “seminal”, which just goes to show that AI isn’t always wrong!

Anyway, here is a scanned PDF of the paper:

Apologies that it’s a bit grubby and wonky, but the scan is made from an old photocopy. I did have a proper offprint somewhere, but I can’t find it.

The real reason for doing this post, however, is to use it as a counter-example to something people often bring up when I criticize academic publishers: “..but they curate the literature!”. They don’t, actually. Libraries do that. The Garrett-Coles paper is available as a hard copy in libraries, but the publisher has nothing to do with that!

P.S. I did a blog post a while ago based on part of the paper.

P.P.S. If I get time I’ll contact ADS to see if they want to put this up in the official biblipgraphic collection…

We could applaud #TaylorAndFrancis for pausing submissions at a journal that seems to be publishing a lot of fraudulent papers. Or we could ask why it waited until now.
https://www.science.org/content/article/journal-plagued-problematic-papers-likely-paper-mills-pauses-submissions
(#paywalled)

"Out of a sample of nearly 900 papers _Bioengineered_ published from 𝟮𝟬𝟭𝟬 through 2023, one-quarter showed signs of image manipulation or duplication." (Emphasis added.)

#Misconduct #PaperMills #Publishers #ScholComm

AI Translation Sparks Backlash from Translators and Authors: Self-Publishing News with Dan Holloway

Another week, more AI angst. While the Meta AI scandal is not going away any time soon, this week it is AI translation that’s causing the issues—specifically, academic publishing giant Taylor & Francis’s decision to use AI translation…
https://selfpublishingadvice.org/ai-translation/

#AITranslation #copyrightconcerns #ElonMuskxAI #OpenAIimagegenerator #TaylorAndFrancis
@indieauthors

"Between 2019/20 and 2022/23, the University [of Cambridge] paid £12.6M to seven major commercial #publishers: #Elsevier, #Wiley, Taylor & Francis, #Springer, #Sage, Oxford University Press (#OUP), and Cambridge University Press (#CUP). This was the highest expenditure among 21 UK #universities that provided data."

https://www.varsity.co.uk/news/29280

#science #journals #publishing #taylorandfrancis #highered

We care about your privacy!

At Taylor & Francis, we really do! That's why we have no less than 874 partners that just need to get notified when you want to read one of our journal articles!

#privacy #cookies #partners #TaylorAndFrancis #scammers #AcademicPublishing

#Microsoft just might have purchased access to your research to train their #genAI models.

Msc, MA, or else, you just joined our friends, the artists, in becoming some soup without agency producing raw material for some factory to suck up and pollute everywhere, as T&F sold your work to Microsoft. Enjoy.

If you're a researcher you are used to pay for gold OA. You are used to do reviews for free and of course the papers you write are free, too. To pass editorial selection you basically need to connect to already published papers of the outlet. You always have to go all in for some publisher to profit off of your work, basically stealing public money. So that is just another lovely flower in the garden of academic publishing.

I would say: go green OA but whatever license you use they are going steal your work anyway.

https://www.thebookseller.com/news/academic-authors-shocked-after-taylor--francis-sells-access-to-their-research-to-microsoft-ai

#TaylorAndFrancis #academia

Latest #FOSSAcademic, in which I talk a bit more about #TaylorAndFrancis selling off academic work to #Microsoft, and I share a link to my #IETF presentation on #ActivityPub:

https://fossacademic.tech/2024/07/25/ASM-update.html

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