Journalism Basics Sample: Fill & Download for Free

No, not at all.There are no numerical-based questions in the examination paper of Commercial Applications for 9th and 10th grade ICSE students. However, to understand the concepts of journals, ledgers, trial balances, balance sheets, receipts and payments accounts, income and expenditure accounts, accounting principles, etc, I would strongly recommend getting a few basic sample problems and working them out. This will certainly enhance conceptual clarity.As far as the paper is concerned, all the questions are theory-based. The only application-based questions in the paper are the case studies, which again require concept-based learning from the textbook.

Presumably most respondents who took Science magazine's recent survey were scientists (1). Results suggest they whole-heartedly endorse Sci-Hub (see figures below from 1).88% say it isn't wrong to download pirated papers.For >50%, it's the only way to access scientific papers.>60% think Sci-Hub will disrupt traditional scientific publishing.Sci-Hub and Alexandra Elbakyan have accomplished two important breakthroughsProvided pirated access to paywalled scientific journals and in doing so, revealed the previously unimagined extent to which scientists the world over lacked access to scientific papers, often to even their own published work.Brought Scientific Publishing to mainstream awareness. While the odium and coercion inherent to its structure are well-known to scientists themselves or should be at the very least, Sci-Hub and Elbakyan have helped cast a more prominent spotlight on it so it's under broader scrutiny, helping fuel its long overdue Napster moment.What Sci-Hub and Elbakyan have done and why can only be fully appreciated by understanding what Scientific Publishing's odium and coercion consist of, and why in hindsight it seems inevitable something like Sci-Hub would come up sooner or later.Scientific Publishing In A NutshellMost basic science research is taxpayer-funded.Scientific credibility and career advancement, especially in academia, depend on peer-reviewed scientific publication of such research.Enter Scientific Publishing.Dominated by for-profit publishing houses like Elsevier, Springer-Nature, Wiley to name a few, whose platforms publish among the most prestigious scientific journals in the various scientific specialities.Publishing in such journals is considered necessary for scientists to accrue credibility and advancement.In a throwback to post-Renaissance Independent scientist, scientists, as editorial board members and even just peers, perform peer-review of each other's manuscripts pro-bono (free), meaning free of cost to Scientific Publishers.Burden of Scientific Publishers is mainly limited to page layouts, editing and publishing, now mainly online.Since the internet exploded in the mid-1990s, most Scientific Publishers have migrated online and their costs have dramatically reduced since electronic publishing costs a fraction of print.Scientific Publishers manage to cut administrative costs even more to the bone by out-sourcing editing processes to back offices in developing countries.Scientific Publishers typically own the copyright to papers scientists publish on their journals. Why? Answer's lost to the mists of time.For-profit Scientific Journals are typically Paywalled: Scientific Publishers charge an arm and a leg for accessing just one paper on their web-sites. Such paywalls can range from US $6 to >$50 for just one paper, even for papers published decades earlier, and even for scientists who've published in those same journals and/or have peer-reviewed pro bono on their behalf.Annual subscriptions to the thousands of journals published by these Scientific Publishers is an onerous financial burden even for the best-endowed universities in the world like Harvard (2).In other words, established, for-profit Scientific Publishers are middlemen making money hand over fist for work product that's largely taxpayer-funded, then deemed worthy of publication free of cost by scientific peers, who then have to pay through their noses to access their own published work, which by the way they don't even own the copyright to. For people considered really smart by the rest of society, how could scientists have allowed themselves to be bamboozled to such an extent? A question for the ages, that.The explosion of the internet brought the fruits of scientists' labor that much closer to their brethren the world over but in this case, the Digital divide's exacerbated by the outrageously priced paywalls. Science is a rather unique enterprise in that it's essentially cooperative and collaborative, and advances by Standing on the shoulders of giants, as the saying goes. In practical terms, this means accessing and reading hundreds to thousands of peer-reviewed scientific papers relevant to one's own field of study, both in helping formulate one's own scientific work as well as citing these other studies to help rationalize one's results and help justify one's interpretation. If Harvard finds it hard to subscribe to all scientific journals its students need, no way a Kazakhstan scientist like Elbakyan could access and download all the papers necessary for their research. Thus, sheer frustration with an untenable status quo likely drove the creation of Elbakyan's mirror site, Sci-Hub.Open-access Scientific Journals: Their Advantages And PitfallsSince the 2000s, Open access journals have appeared as an economically less onerous alternative to the robber baron for-profit Scientific Publishers. However, open access journals have at least three obstacles they haven't yet managed to successfully overcome.One, path to successful grants and promotions is greased by prestigious peer-reviewed publications. This is still largely the purview of for-profit journals who accrued such prestige over decades, some, even centuries. Big names and big name wannabees in various scientific sub-fields prop up this status quo by continuing to publish their 'best' work in these journals rather than gravitating to their newer, less notable, open-access counterparts. Though big names like Fields Medal winning mathematician Timothy Gowers (3), and Nobel Prize-winner Randy Schekman (4) have openly proclaimed their rejection of these so-called 'luxury' journals, the trickle hasn't yet become a flood, and rank and file scientists continue to offer their 'best' work to long-established, for-profit, paywalled prestige journals.Two, current open-access largely subsidizes free access through prohibitive front-end costs to authors who publish in them. In the post-Great Recession world, when even government-funded labs are forced to cut costs to the bone, paying on average ~US $2000 to get a paper published in PLOS or BioMed Central is an onerous financial burden. Plos and BioMedCentral are examples of open access publishers who've managed to accrue prestige sufficient to be competitive against their older for-profit counterparts.Three, sensing opportunity, open-access has become a lure attracting a host of rapacious publishers looking to make a killing. They offer junior scientists the opportunity to both publish and peer-review on their journals, and use this imprimatur to attract their peers but ultimately their editorial processes are far less stringent to the established norms. Papers published in these ever-mushrooming journals muddy the scientific waters, making it more difficult for the rank and file traditional speciality science journals to distinguish themselves from their newer, predatory counterparts. This problem has assumed such epidemic proportions that Jeffrey Beall, librarian at Auraria Library, University of Colorado, Denver, Colorado, annually publishes his list of predatory, open-access publishers (5) to help scientists sift gold from dross in Scientific Publishing.Science publishing, especially in biomedical research, is thus passing through one of its most momentous transitions. Heavyweights in the public health arena like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation have instituted guidelines mandating publications ensuing from their grants be published in open-access journals starting in January 2017 (6). The Gates Foundation will pay the author fees charged by such open-access journals. The onus is now on governments, other science funders, universities and research institutes to develop approaches that ensure taxpayer-funded research becomes open-access for all from the moment they're published, regardless of the journal it's published in. After all, as things stand, imprimatur of peer-review remains the gold standard for grants and career advancement in science, at least in biomedical research. At this moment, it’s unclear how experiments like bioRxiv, pre-publication repository of raw biology data, will influence scientists’ careers.Bibliography1. In survey, most give thumbs-up to pirated papers. Science, John Travis, May 6, 2016.2. Harvard University says it can't afford journal publishers' prices. The Guardian, Ian Sample, April 24, 2012.3. Elsevier — my part in its downfall. Tim Gowers, Jan 21, 2012.4. How journals like Nature, Cell and Science are damaging science | Randy Schekman, The Guardian, December 9, 2013.5. Beall’s List of Predatory Publishers 2016.6. Gates Foundation to require immediate free access for journal articles. Science, Jocelyn Kaiser, November 21, 2014.

This year has had quite a few controversies I think will be important to evaluate for academia going forward. I'd like to discuss the institutional ones rather than the isolated instances that are to be expected whenever people try to game the system, as these have much broader implications for the academic community.I'm not even going to bother with a tl;dr -- it wouldn't do these challenges justice.Banning p valuesEarlier this year, the journal Basic and Applied Social Psychology banned the use of null hypothesis significance testing, a frequentist approach to statistical inference. There's been a lot of discussion in recent years about the reliability and utility of inferential statistics, specifically the use of p-values because they are the most commonly used (taught as early as high school).For those unfamiliar with it, there's a rule-of-thumb taught early on that statistical tests yielding a p-value less than 0.05 indicates statistical significance. A lot of cynicism is being cast now on how this is being abused, especially in the social sciences where statistics play a pivotal role."We believe that the p < .05 bar is too easy to pass and sometimes serves as an excuse for lower quality research."- Basic and Applied Social PsychologyA recent study by the Psychology Reproducibility Project found that only 39% of the studies they attempted to reproduce (97% of which reported p < 0.05 for their effects) also yielded p < 0.05. Naturally, this led to a lot of media hype. Consequently, the practice of p-hacking, or cheating on a p-value, is under a lot of scrutiny now.My view: There are a lot of strawman arguments against p-values that frame the debate in a far more malicious form. FiveThirtyEight had a fantastic article (including a widget illustrating p-hacking) that discusses how we can easily become victims of biases. I don't think the problem is strictly ill intent or lack of rigor, but rather a failure of expectations. As the Reproducibility Project pointed out, "No single indicator sufficiently describes replication success."What most outlets are not highlighting in headlines is the conclusion of the study, which is beautifully written:"After this intensive effort to reproduce a sample of published psychological findings, how many of the effects have we established are true? Zero. And how many of the effects have we established are false? Zero. Is this a limitation of the project design? No. It is the reality of doing science, even if it is not appreciated in daily practice. Humans desire certainty, and science infrequently provides it. As much as we might wish it to be otherwise, a single study almost never provides definitive resolution for or against an effect and its explanation. The original studies examined here offered tentative evidence; the replications we conducted offered additional, confirmatory evidence. In some cases, the replications increase confidence in the reliability of the original results; in other cases, the replications suggest that more investigation is needed to establish the validity of the original findings. Scientific progress is a cumulative process of uncertainty reduction that can only succeed if science itself remains the greatest skeptic of its explanatory claims."Moreover, p-values are not entirely the root of the problem:"[C]orrelational evidence is consistent with the conclusion that variation in the strength of initial evidence (such as original P value) was more predictive of replication success than was variation in the characteristics of the teams conducting the research (such as experience and expertise)."So treat p-values the way they should be treated: a piece of a puzzle. The problem ultimately lies in faulty expectations, both in the value of conclusions from a single study and the strength of statistical inferences.Post-publication peer reviewI think most academics agree that there are problems with peer review. See the following for an overview of criticisms (some of which are incidentally tied to the controversy over p-values):Inna Vishik's answer to What are the shortcomings of the academic publication process and standards? How can we improve the process?The peer review drugs don’t workThe worst piece of peer review I’ve ever receivedAs a result, there's a lot of discussion now about how to modify the peer review process. Born from this are a few new controversial ideas.I'd say the big one right now is PubPeer, an anonymous commenting site that markets itself as an open, post-publication peer review."The inspiration for PubPeer is to make a worldwide journal club where people can discuss the finer points of a scientific paper."- Pioneer behind controversial PubPeer site reveals his identityThe motivation behind anonymous commenting was defended by PubPeer as equivalent to the anonymity of pre-publication review, where it's used to protect early career reviewers. Anonymous commenting on articles is one of those points that remains controversial within academia.My view: I find myself a bit torn on this, partly because the ideals of PubPeer puts academics in the uncomfortable position of evaluating their values. Post-publication review is an important part of scientific discussion and I think academia is certainly not utilizing the internet sufficiently to facilitate this process. Commenting provides infrastructure that gives readers a stronger starting point for critically examining journal articles. In addition, anonymity is essential for protecting individuals from backlash based on their age, field of study, or qualifications; I strongly believe that the background of the individual should not be relevant to their ability to comment on a work so long as they raise cogent and valid points.At the same time, anonymity is a slippery slope toward toxic culture. My biggest concern is how similar the threads can look to those of conspiracy forums -- posts including a series of images sleuthing for cover-ups combined with derisive comments. Here are some examples I found from a cursory search using PubPeer's "Recent" and "Featured" options."The worst examples of data in life science journals"Suppression of tumor cell growth both in nude mice and in culture by n-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids: mediation through cyclooxygenase-independent pathways"That is outstanding detective work."Integrative Analyses of Human Reprogramming Reveal Dynamic Nature of Induced Pluripotency"Jealousy is amusing and childish.The authors have a rather incoherent citation system where they claim novelty and "forget" to cite original papers from other leading groups, and then defend themselves afterwards after being called out in PubPeer by referencing the wrong papers."None of this is to say that these threads are completely or inherently toxic. Scrutinizing articles for misconduct should be an important part of science, and there are also many well-meaning, constructive, and fruitful discussions. My point is that such forums facilitate and amplify the worst along with the best parts of peer review. We need to critically ask ourselves whether the potential benefits outweigh the potential risks. I'm not convinced they are. Notably, anonymous comments can distance us from the human interaction that allows us to be empathetic. This is already a potential risk in blind pre-publication peer review, and we need to think carefully of ways to prevent this from getting even worse with the much louder volume enabled by a post-publication review system.The other major problem with online commenting is the problem of herd mentality. Just as with Yelp, it can be easy to skew the quality of a work based on the impressions of others with very diverse backgrounds and expectations. A lot of the problems with Yelp as a curator of "good" locales are equally extended to the influences of a Yelp-like review system for journal articles. This is a problem intrinsic to any review site that aggregates and curates opinions.Thanks for reading to anyone who made it to the bottom of this very long answer! I'd love to hear others' thoughts on this and other answers to this question.