Emily at The Antidote blogged earlier this year about a topic that has been of great interest to me for a long time – open access to scientific journals. As Americans our taxes pay for lots of research to be done – but we don’t have access to the results of that research. The results get published in journals that are really too expensive for most people to subscribe to – many are hundreds of dollars a year. The only ones who then end up with access are people at universities or large corporations that can afford an institutional subscription rate. That leaves most people without access to the results of research that we have paid for. What can we do about this? I don’t know, I need to learn more about the details of what’s involved. If/when I find out something, I’ll be sure to post it on this blog.

Barry Leiba at Staring at Empty Pages wrote last week about a really frightening report of the UK – only about 5% of reported rapes result in convictions. He then goes through each of the arguments many men use as an excuse for rape – read it – we need more men like him to make it clear to other men that rape is not an acceptable behavior.

One man is killed for teaching girls, another for giving a patient an abortion, an 8 year old girl is sold as a concubine – what do all these cases have in common? Read the The Rational Fool’s post on the Root of Evil II.

In other science news Michael White of Adaptive Complexity updates us on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. There is now so much evidence that people are responsible for climate change that anyone who still tries to say otherwise just looks stupid. He explains it much better than me though.

(Technorati Tags: research, open access)