How can we improve access to primary research on MetaFilter?

October 8, 2012 7:33 PM

Is there a community consensus about best practices for disseminating subscription-only journal material in threads? Also, what can we do to improve access within the community to primary research? Blasdelb's excellent comment in the Lenski thread prompted me to ask about this.

Sometimes a comment (or less frequently, a post) will heavily feature an article from a scientific journal of some sort. Said articles are quite often restricted to people who have a subscription to said journal through an institution such as a university. These sorts of links can be a bit problematic because they aren't accessible to all, but I feel like this is a community that is often interested in seeing and talking about primary research, and I'd like it if we could talk about ways to help people get access to that.

I feel like Blasdelb (and I've seen others doing this stuff too) sets a good example in the comment linked above. His comment provides open-journal links wherever possible such that there's plenty of meat for people to chew on even if they can't get to the closed journals, and he makes an offer to provide article copies to people on a one-on-one basis. (Which may technically be something that the journal publishers would rather people didn't do, but which is something that researchers do all the time for each other or for students or colleagues who lack access.)

What are some other things that we could do to help improve access to journal articles? I myself just put a line in my profile offering to at least attempt to provide copies of articles to anybody who MeMails me asking for one relating to a link on this site. Could we maybe think about putting together a list of people who are willing to do this and throwing it up on the Wiki? Perhaps something like this already exists?

Perhaps this thread would also be a good place for people to share tips for finding open-access versions of articles or open-access publications in general. Google Scholar is a good start here, but I'm sure that others have lots of other sources to recommend.

Finally, is there any feasible way to host articles (Scribd? Coral Cache?) so that people can access them when they might otherwise not be able to? Or is the community/administrative consensus that doing something like that would be crossing a legal line and that one should simply avoid using articles that cannot easily be provided in an open-access format? I would understand that sentiment, but I feel like having access to original research can often really improve quality of discussion and that sometimes not being able to provide access can make it impossible to have an informed discussion about something. I feel like it would be good if we could come up with a general-purpose solution to this problem, but perhaps there just isn't one and we'll have to muddle through as best we can.

Anyway, I wanted to solicit the community's thoughts on this issue and see what ideas people have for improving access to primary research within the MetaFilter community for the purposes of improving discussion and education.

posted by Scientist to MetaFilter-Related at 7:33 PM (41 comments total)

I should mention that I have indeed read the relevant part of the FAQ on this subject but am mostly talking about comments here rather than posts and am looking to brainstorm ways to make posting to primary research more workable more of the time, while understanding that sometimes there may not be a good solution and the community will have to settle for an abstract or just miss out on something completely.
posted by Scientist at 7:33 PM on October 8, 2012

Given how happy academics usually are to find people reading and discussing their papers, one possibility would be if people wanting to make a post about something that is behind an academic paywall should email the researcher involved and ask about whether they would be prepared to put a preprint/draft or otherwise legal version of the paper up on their academic website, or provide such a thing to the mefite so that it could be hosted on Scribd or something.
posted by lollusc at 8:37 PM on October 8, 2012 [5 favorites]

A good idea, lollusc. Many researchers post their papers on their websites as a matter of course, as well. If one is faced with a locked-down abstract in a pay-to-read journal, it is often worth googling the authors' names and seeing if anything can be turned up on their personal websites. If not then I've always had excellent results simply asking people for copies of their papers, though not usually fast enough to be of great use for a moving discussion on MetaFilter. Still, it's worth trying.
posted by Scientist at 9:07 PM on October 8, 2012 [4 favorites]

I've always had excellent results simply asking people for copies of their papers, though not usually fast enough to be of great use for a moving discussion on MetaFilter.

And I think that, practically speaking, may just be a thing where it's a bit of a bummer but that needs to be okay. Aiming for open-access journals where possible is the easiest sort of officially sanctionable approach to this stuff; sharing links in comments with the disclosure that they may not be accessible to a lot of readers is fine; explicitly declaring an intent to circumvent paywall / access wall stuff by rehosting on Scribd or whatever is sort of sticky and not great regardless of the intent.

I wish this stuff were not such a pain and that everybody would just get on board with open access philosophies across the board, but in the world we're living in at the moment sometimes lack of open access is just gonna be an inconvenient thing.
posted by cortex (staff) at 9:39 PM on October 8, 2012 [5 favorites]

I think I'm with cortex on this one,

Generally when I make this sort of offer I get one or two requests, the most I've ever gotten has been six, and I'm cool with that. So far I haven't gotten any requests for this specific set, and I suppose the folks its most interesting to have their own access. For myself, I have crazy good access to journals, even for an academic, where I currently have access through three libraries; one of whom is funded by one of the most profitable sports programs in the country. In my specific field I need it. Indeed, I am very lucky to have the access I do, but every single PDF I acquire through one of my libraries is marked with information that will ultimately identify the library I use and me as the only legitimate person to have a copy. At the same time, just about all of the agreements between the libraries I have access to and the publishers they get PDFs from state explicitly that patrons are to only use downloaded PDFs for personal purposes. However, many of those agreements, though not all, give explicit exceptions for very limited distribution for the direct purpose of specific academic discussions.

When I offer to email PDFs to folks I am putting my ass on the line trusting that those PDFs will not go any further than that person and end up on Scribd or anything like that where I will lose control of how it spreads, and my distribution of the PDFs can no longer plausibly be claimed limited or for the direct purpose of an academic discussion. My current paradigm for doing this is one I've arrived at through a lot of thought and is stretching it enough, where I would not relish the thought of trying to explain to my department chair how it is I think metafilter is capable of academic discussions in the first place.

That said, this non-solution does still frustrate the fuck out of me, and even it was recently reduced to a pretty fucked up absurdity recently. Where the article in that FPP shows no evidence of the author having ever actually ponying up the $20 to read the damn study being talked about; he only cites things available from the abstract, most of his points are directly addressed in the actual paper in ways that make him look like an idiot, and there are plenty of parts not in the abstract that he could have referenced to support his points that went unmentioned. Similarly, I got zero replies to the offer I made to send PDFs in the thread and no one else referenced having access. Folks had already formed opinions on the topic and even solid, accessible, and relevant science wasn't going to have any effect.

If anyone can think of better solutions I am all ears, but my access will not be shared without at least some ceremonial measure of control. The most important legal line isn't really at the site level but at the liability of the user sharing.
posted by Blasdelb at 12:25 AM on October 9, 2012 [3 favorites]

"Given how happy academics usually are to find people reading and discussing their papers, one possibility would be if people wanting to make a post about something that is behind an academic paywall should email the researcher involved and ask about whether they would be prepared to put a preprint/draft or otherwise legal version of the paper up on their academic website, or provide such a thing to the mefite so that it could be hosted on Scribd or something."

I am such an academic and would indeed be overjoyed to have my work being talked about on metafilter, but I don't know of a publisher these days that would allow work substantially similar to a non-open access paper to be made effectively open access by an author. Especially the kinds of things that get enough press to be picked up by metafilter would be particularly risky for authors. The best we could really hope for would be maybe a powerpoint .ppt/.pptx if we are lucky and they feel like investing the time.
posted by Blasdelb at 2:08 AM on October 9, 2012

Every contract I've signed for journal article publication specifies some way in which I can put a version of my paper online openly. Some require that I wait a year, others that I only put up the version from before refereeing/revision (with the disclaimer that it is different from the published version and that only the published one should be cited), and others allow me to put up the refereed/revised version, but not with final pagination and formatting. (Again so someone citing it has to refer to the actual published one).

Most colleagues don't seem to know about these options, but they also don't read the small print on their contracts. Also, on the few contracts I've seen that don't specify it, I've been able to get the publisher/journal to agree to add a line about the right to put preprints online, with a simple request. Only once did they refuse.

Admittedly I'm not publishing in Nature or anything, and I expect the rules are different for the very top journals where a lot of the newsworthy stuff comes out.
posted by lollusc at 2:25 AM on October 9, 2012

Blasdelb: "I don't know of a publisher these days that would allow work substantially similar to a non-open access paper to be made effectively open access by an author."

At least in physics, math and CS, it's extremely-common-bordering-on-standard for preprints to be available on arXiv.
posted by vasi at 3:06 AM on October 9, 2012

God, how I wish we had the cohesion to get away with something like arXiv in the biological sciences, but yeah, I guess my experience is limited to that. While I understand that arrangements like the one lollusc describes used to be common in my neck of the woods, they seem to have become rare outside some of the small journals that haven't yet been absorbed by larger publishers. Hell, the paper of mine linked at the top of my profile is set up in a way that is almost mirror opposite, where free access will end in a few months. These days the rules I see are that one can supply pre-revision versions to my students en mass in a class one is teaching, or directly to specific people, but can't do anything that is both en mass and available to the public - unless one pays for it.
posted by Blasdelb at 4:22 AM on October 9, 2012

or provide such a thing to the mefite so that it could be hosted on Scribd or something.

You'd be running into self-link problems if you're the one who posts it on the internet and then you make a post about it.
posted by John Cohen at 4:45 AM on October 9, 2012

My library is actively promoting an open access depository for the work of professors and staff of the college. I suspect many of them would be glad to post their pre-prints if there was such interest in them (though many do not actually have their own copies.) Whenever I've linked to a paywalled article, I've hopefully also mentioned that I would be happy to pass it onwards, though no one has yet taken me up on it. Academia.edu is also increasingly more popular in some humanities fields, though I think out skews towards younger researchers.

That said, it would be illegal to post someone else's copyrighted work to Scribd or another hosting site, and they're pretty good at scrubbing dubious materials. I love though that mefites do post links to the original source material, and I hope that more and more of those sources are freely available in the near future.
posted by jetlagaddict at 4:55 AM on October 9, 2012 [1 favorite]

I actually agree that something like Scribd is probably not a usable work-around here, for all the reasons mentioned above, and I understand that even providing papers on a one-on-one basis is not without some risk and doesn't really scale. This leaves the community without a general-purpose solution to the problem, I think, which is too bad.

There do seem to be a lot of options though that work at least some of the time and which are worth looking into when one wants to link to primary research outside of academia. Does anybody know if there's a guide out there on the internet to using such resources, for people who want to see a copy of a paper but don't have a journal subscription? A repository of advice for the interested layperson for how to go about finding/getting papers?

If there isn't then I may have to make one, starting with the suggestions mentioned in this thread. If that happens, perhaps I'll post it to Projects so that people who wish to can go over it and help me think of tips to add in.
posted by Scientist at 5:29 AM on October 9, 2012 [2 favorites]

provide such a thing to the mefite so that it could be hosted on Scribd or something

Many journals require assignment of copyright for publication. This would be, legally, even in a draft or preprint form, as much of a violation of copyright as, say providing a link to a movie torrent. There is much winking and nodding at this in practice as authors will frequently publish their own papers to the net, but some journals are a lot more strict about this (ACS) than others (SETAC).

This could buy a lot of heartache for the site. I'd suggest that this isn't a great idea in general.
posted by bonehead at 5:36 AM on October 9, 2012

I'm sorry I mentioned Scribd. I knew that wide-scale pirate hosting of copyrighted content wasn't the solution and I shouldn't have brought it up as it's turned out to be a distraction. There do seem to be some options that work at least some of the time though, and to the extent that we can draw attention to those options here I feel that we can incrementally improve the state of discussion on the Blue.
posted by Scientist at 5:44 AM on October 9, 2012

Well, I can certainly rec ILL; we do lend articles for free to many academic institutions and almost all public libraries. This gets harder for the most recent articles only available electronically. We also allow "walk-in" patrons full access to our databases through the library's computers during business hours. This is, I think, more common for smaller libraries than larger ones, but if you live near an academic institution with public business hours it can never hurt to ask. I think many people (this includes undergrads and grad students) are often unwilling or shy about emailing authors about their work, which is a shame. It's also surprising what does turn up on Google-- not just Academia and OA portfolios but especially ArchivX and the free author's manuscripts on PubMed or short term free access to certain titles (Maney does this on a semi-monthly basis, the BMJ sometimes has free papers) or MyJStor. Would you be looking to collate specifics like that, or more of a procedural one?
posted by jetlagaddict at 5:49 AM on October 9, 2012

Doesn't the University of MetaFilter have institutional subscriptions to this sort of stuff? If not, I'm totally transferring to Reddit State. They have a better football team anyway.
posted by Rock Steady at 5:50 AM on October 9, 2012 [2 favorites]

If I do embark on such a project (still hoping that I can find someone who has done this before me, when I have a chance to look) I will definitely be interested in specific troves of open-access papers as well as procedural workarounds for getting access to subscription-only publications.
posted by Scientist at 6:08 AM on October 9, 2012

Can one add OpenDOAR, the Directory of Open Access Repositories, to the list? This allows one to search across the contents of 2,000 or so academic repositories. It's still functional, though ambiguous as to whether it's currently maintained or not.

(As a side distraction, search those contents with the word "Metafilter" - including the speech marks - to drag up full article/papers about the blue.)

Also, you may wish to experiment with DOAJ, the Directory of Open Access Journals. Search for journals, or articles in journals.
posted by Wordshore at 7:31 AM on October 9, 2012 [10 favorites]

That's a hell of a pair of links, Wordshore. Trust a librarian to know where the good stuff is at. Having a couple of resources like that means a lot of the work has already been done for me and makes the idea of putting together a project seem a lot more manageable. I think that I'll see if I can't put something together in the coming weeks, just as a personal project. I would absolutely welcome whatever advice on resources and techniques people might continue to provide, and assuming that I can find the time to put this together I will be sure to publicly thank MetaFilter for the assistance provided here.
posted by Scientist at 7:40 AM on October 9, 2012

Doesn't the University of MetaFilter have institutional subscriptions to this sort of stuff?

There have been interesting coordinated pushes to have groups of individuals all chipping in to a shared pool to purchase access to things like the OED online. It's much more problematic than you would think it would be, primarily because these organizations/institutions really don't WANT to sell a subscription to a motley assortment of individuals. They want to work with big institutions so that they can sell big bundles of things and work with an organization with an established reputation in a way that both giant orgs can come away with something, nominally.

Realistically of course the trickle-down effects are that there is a subset of knowledge that can only be readily accessed by people who are already either in the academic or business world elite and/or who have mad librarian-type of skills to dig this stuff up on an article by article basis. And, as we saw with the public domain content on JSTOR debacle, trying to maximize and increase access to this content is seen by some as tantamount to thievery. An oversimplification, to be sure, but we'd be lying if we weren't very clear that this is an issue of money and control.

So, as cortex said above, we have to stick within letter of the law stuff (we are super not comfy with scribd stuff of unknown origin) but usually we can work out some informal lending library stuff among people who have institutional access. That said, it needs to not be that overt and comments and posts still need to be understandable even if someone didn't email someone else for a link to an article.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 8:15 AM on October 9, 2012 [3 favorites]

There's lists of open access journals and articles floating around, but they're always just partial lists. Too many titles. Too many articles. Too many new additions. It's impossible, even with really specific niche academic areas, to pull together a comprehensive list of all the relevant journals and articles. Many have tried - and on that, there's a myriad of these lists, and many postgrad students especially try and pull together such a list for their topic, sometimes putting online.

A few more blunt tools include:

- Wikipedia list of open-access journals, and the metalinks off the bottom of that
- Another Wikipedia list, this one of 323 OA journals
- OA scholarly journals in education
- One thousand Ancient Studies OA journals
- A Wikipedia list of OA projects

It does look collectively impressive until one realises that it's just a minority fraction of contemporary peer-reviewed stuff. And that it can mean subtly different things; Fifty Shades of Open Access.

btw Jessamyn is dead right about sticking within the letter of the law. Elsevier, to take the most well-known example, have or had [citation forgotten; sorry] over a thousand lawyers internally or on retainer worldwide. MetaFilter have, one suspects, rather less. The former of these is a multi billion dollar turnover publishing company and, not surprisingly, they probably want to stay that way for as long as possible.

This battle is a long battle.
posted by Wordshore at 9:07 AM on October 9, 2012 [3 favorites]

Correct me if I am wrong - I often am - but isn't one of the major hinderances to open information Jstor which is owned by Ithaka and run by these people governed by this board whose shared commitment to higher education (mission statement) seems to be to screw every dime out the system that is possible.
if you are not associated with academia it seems you have no right to knowledge. Well fuck that.
To add insult to injury they take one of my favorite poems as a ''touchstone'' for their organization complete with a warning not to reproduce this poem in any format. A little bit of Intellectual revolution is called for. These people should really be metaphorically put against the wall. Name and shame. Bastards.
posted by adamvasco at 9:35 AM on October 9, 2012

To add insult to injury they take one of my favorite poems as a ''touchstone'' for their organization complete with a warning not to reproduce this poem in any format.

They're going to tell James Bond which poems he can recite?
posted by MonkeyToes at 9:58 AM on October 9, 2012

JStor is a little different that you're picturing it, I think. It's not a publisher and it doesn't hold the copyright to its materials; it has its own licenses which it works out with the original publishers. I don't like all of their policies, but they're one of the best for ILLing materials, and they've rolled out two new services for people either no longer in academia or who are independent scholars in addition to their Early Journal Content program. JStor packages often do not include the most recent 3-5 years of a publication anyway-- it depends on the publisher, your institution or professional society, etc. In other words, JStor is a middleman non-profit.
posted by jetlagaddict at 9:58 AM on October 9, 2012 [2 favorites]

I don't think it's necessary for the same reason that Blasdelb gets very few requests for papers when he offers. Actually reading a paper outside your own subject area is extremely time consuming because you have to track down and read a lot of the references to understand what is actually going on.
posted by atrazine at 10:49 AM on October 9, 2012

I am one of those fortunate people with full academic library access, and some of the sharey suggestions here are well outside of the guidelines I am bound by, though I am sure some institutions have more relaxed rules.
posted by Forktine at 10:57 AM on October 9, 2012

Sadly it's not available to anyone outside the UK, but it is possible to access the OED online for free if you have a valid library card number.
posted by talitha_kumi at 11:22 AM on October 9, 2012

"I don't think it's necessary for the same reason that Blasdelb gets very few requests for papers when he offers. Actually reading a paper outside your own subject area is extremely time consuming because you have to track down and read a lot of the references to understand what is actually going on."

Indeed, for all of the noise we make about the metafilter detective squad mentality and love for science, the actual demand for scientific papers does appear to be vanishingly small. Before we get to full of ourselves I think it might be important to remember this.
posted by Blasdelb at 11:22 AM on October 9, 2012

I don't think it's necessary for the same reason that Blasdelb gets very few requests for papers when he offers.

I'm another of the paper offerererers. I try to remember to non overt it with something like "I got them papers homie, whatchu need?", but other times I just went ahead and put it out there. I can count on one hand the amount of times I've gotten contacted (I talked with blasdeb in memail about this earlier this year). Even when a link gets dropped in a thread I'll watch it and see how many people grab it, and it's almost always just a few, something like 6 or less, at least in the first day.

I don't know if people don't want to see the stuff, or they are not keen on having to get it from a d/l place, or not keen on having to get it from another mefite. Things change, but I typically can get any article from any journal. Both from my own resources and thanks to being a tiny part of the motley assortment Jessamyn mentioned.

I'm always surprised that more people don't send memails or contact me for the papers. But I suppose either they already have access, can get enough context from the posts of those who do, or just move on to the next post and figure if it is that important, the information will become public enough soon.
posted by cashman at 11:37 AM on October 9, 2012

Before we get to full of ourselves I think it might be important to remember this.

I don't often get the chance to cite my first ever comment to MeTa, so let me point out once again that there could be alternative hypotheses to explain Chewiegate.

Seriously though, it would be nice if there were some resource on: "Options for accessing academic journals if you are not in academia"

One thing that might be worth mentioning here is that some institutions let their alumni have access to at least a selection of journals.
posted by philipy at 11:52 AM on October 9, 2012

the actual demand for scientific papers does appear to be vanishingly small.

I don't think this follows at all. What follows is that the demand for scientific papers among MeFites who don't already have access to them is vanishingly small. People who already have, or can finagle, journal access aren't going to bother MeMailing for samizdat copies.
posted by RogerB at 12:04 PM on October 9, 2012

Seriously though, it would be nice if there were some resource on: "Options for accessing academic journals if you are not in academia"

Added to the Wiki. Feel free to edit.
posted by grouse at 12:37 PM on October 9, 2012 [1 favorite]

Correct me if I am wrong - I often am - but isn't one of the major hinderances to open information Jstor which is owned by Ithaka and run by these people governed by this board whose shared commitment to higher education (mission statement) seems to be to screw every dime out the system that is possible.

Okay, you are wrong. Here's why:

Bad mouthing the folks at ITHIKA and JSTOR is really unnecessary. ITHIKA (the organization) is an NFP that does excellent and unfortunately very expensive work. JSTOR is one of their programs and while not everything on it is completely open, it's worth noting that over 500,000 articles were digitized by JSTOR and are given away every day, completely free to all with a computer and connectivity. They have also been actively pushing publishers to provide their work as openly as possible, including talking all of them into giving those who do have access a DRM-free version of what they're after. Those who do have access get access in the form of a PDF that can be printed, copied, and shared. Given that this work does indeed have costs associated with it, I think they've made some great progress in that effort. They have managed to make hoards of content available completely DRM free while carefully balancing the need for NFP publishers like the one I work for to remain sustainable.

That they are using an in copyright poem, and got permission from the the Princeton University Press (another NFP) to use also it isn't evidence of their ethics, it's evidence of their knowledge of the law, and their willingness to show the common courtesy of asking to use something that isn't theirs.

BTW, if you really need an article that you can't get access to, and you can't get it from the author or their institutional repository, you can also try Reddit Scholar.
posted by Toekneesan at 12:51 PM on October 9, 2012 [4 favorites]

One thing that might be worth mentioning here is that some institutions let their alumni have access to at least a selection of journals.

I continue to bug-fix and update some code that I wrote for my MSci thesis five years ago*. This is why I continue to have pretty much the same library access as I did when I was a student. Ironically I studied astrophysics and all the important papers there show up on the Arxive anyway.

When I was unemployed for a few months I read every issue of Nature, more or less from cover to cover. I takes a long time to do that.


*Because I was a dumbass when I was 21, it is written in three different languages and is basically unmaintainable but it does one or two things very well and thus continues to be used. (It was originally in five languages, one of them Common Lisp).
posted by atrazine at 12:55 PM on October 9, 2012 [1 favorite]

Here are a few resources to give people background about the issue of scholarly publishing.

This is a good summary of the current state of affairs.

This is where you can advocate for greater access to publicly funded research.

And if you're a faculty author and aren't already modifying your publication contracts to allow for open access to your work you should download the author addendum and read up on other resources at SPARC. (And talk to your university's Scholarly Communications Librarian! Our job is to help you archive open access copies of your work in the appropriate institutional repository.)
posted by MsMolly at 1:31 PM on October 9, 2012

To qualify my quarrel with Jstor and others.
I am not part of academia nor have I ever been, I do not live in an English speaking country. Most of the articles I want are historical, non scientific and often several years ie 10 / 20 / 30 or more years old. Some people here have very kindly helped me and I believe will continue to do so as my requests are pretty eclectic.
My personal belief is that knowledge should be free to those who want it, which may be naive, because you know I grew up in a society where education was a right not a priviledge and it was free.
There is also the argument about academics producing papers that a third party then decides to sell / restrict access to.
So yes a big shout out to those who help share knowlege freely. Thank You.
posted by adamvasco at 1:38 PM on October 9, 2012

Forgot one more resource.

Sources of Open Access and Public Access Content (mainly focused on biomedical content)
posted by MsMolly at 1:44 PM on October 9, 2012

We could make a list of mefites with access to such articles who might be willing to lend their (ahem) personal copies of such articles to serious scholarly mefites who lack such access. We might not even need to make a list, I'm sure there could be some relatively easy way to search mefites by occupation, no?

Also, when looking for articles be sure and search google scholar- scholar.google.com-, and go to the university page of the researcher. Doing one or both often leads to full-text versions of articles that are otherwise behind a paywall/subscription wall.
posted by mareli at 1:51 PM on October 9, 2012

When I was unemployed for a few months I read every issue of Nature, more or less from cover to cover. I takes a long time to do that.

I should clarify - I read every issue as it came out, I didn't go into the archives and read every issue of Nature ever.
posted by atrazine at 1:53 PM on October 9, 2012

cashman writes "I'm always surprised that more people don't send memails or contact me for the papers. But I suppose either they already have access, can get enough context from the posts of those who do, or just move on to the next post and figure if it is that important, the information will become public enough soon."

There is a great deal of truth in this. The internet is such a fire hose Niagrafalls deluge of content and information that it's tough to spend anytime overcoming access restrictions unless one either needs the access for work/professional reasons or the topic is something one is already interested in. Dilettantes like myself aren't going to bother; I've already got a few lifetimes of reading backlogged so why bother.
posted by Mitheral at 6:50 PM on October 9, 2012 [3 favorites]

I've already got a few lifetimes of reading backlogged so why bother.

I know right...I wish the boffins would hurry up with the matrix style jack so I can be all like "Whoa."
posted by AElfwine Evenstar at 6:02 AM on October 10, 2012