As we’ve been in the same house for over two years now, we decided that we should move things around a bit (Forces lifestyle, see. Get itchy feet after 18 months).
We’ve swapped the girls’ bedrooms over, and now we’re thinking of exchanging sewing room with study (I sometimes working from home, and the current sewing room is more private than the study; and wouldn’t have the girls’ computer in it). In preparation for this mammoth task, I’m going through some boxes that have remained essentially untouched since we emigrated. I’m currently running at six piles of stuff:
- rubbish
- recycling
- work-related
- personal documents, memorabilia, stuff that we might need
- RAF first day covers
- things I don’t know where to put, yet
In one particular box I found some risk assessments, written when we were getting very ticked off with the whole unHealth & Safety Department nonsense. Here’s one, for example:
That’s easy to deal with – I’ll recycle the paper and take the binder to work. But a large proportion of that ‘work’ pile consists of reprints.
And I seriously don’t know what to do with them. The papers themselves are all available online. There is a rainforest the size of Wales worth of carbon locked in there. Do I sprinkle them like cherry blossom upon the poor unsuspecting students? Do I give them away so that when I’m (in)famous people will be able to hold a piece of my history in their hand? Do I instead sell them with the promise that I will be (in)famous one day?
Are there, somewhere in the world, seventy-eight people desperate for a copy of Structural basis for the interaction between the Tap/NXF1 UBA domain and FG nucleoporins at 1 Å resolution ?
Please, if you come across such a lost soul, send them to find me.
I’ll even share my risk assessments.
Do you still have the risk assessment for preparing incompetent cells?
I can’t bring myself to chuck my old reprints either. I actually miss how it used to be, in the days of yore, those few weeks after your paper came out (in print, of course) – the small flood of postcards, exotically stamped with decidedly foreign handwriting, requesting a reprint. A nice ritual of science, now gone forever.
I met up with my ex-boss on Tuesday, and we talked about the doing and computerization of science. We reflected that while I was there manuscript submission changed from many photocopies and slow mail (including courtesy copies to friends), to completely online submissions. March of progress, she do the waltz.
I moved house (twice) with a whole filing cabinet full of reprints – some showered upon me from grateful authors; others the result of research for books; a pitiful few from my own Ph.D. days – until, eventually, I dumped the lot. I don’t miss them. So what to do with old reprints?
Way to kill a comment thread, Henry.
Ah, this seems to be the next stage of discarding your past life – perhaps we are always going to be recycling what went before, no less painful each time from the next.
I own one reprint, of a friend’s paper from History Workshop Journal which is genuinely appreciated and interesting, as it is somewhat autobiographical. I’m not sure I’d want anyone’s Structural basis for the interaction between the Tap/NXF1 UBA domain and FG nucleoporins at 1 Å resolution.
Oh, please Scott.
Ees a veery nice structure. Just look at that 2 sigma.
You should go about the streets with a basket of them, singing “Who will buy my beautiful reprints?”
You could intercut them with straw bales and make an eco-house.
Lights were shining from every window, and there was a savory smell of roast goose, for it was New-year’s eve—yes, she remembered that. In a corner, between two houses, one of which projected beyond the other, she sank down and huddled herself together. She had drawn her little feet under her, but she could not keep off the cold; and she dared not go home, for she had sold no reprints, and could not take home even a penny of money. Her father would certainly beat her; besides, it was almost as cold at home as here, for they had only the roof to cover them, through which the wind howled, although the largest holes had been stopped up with straw and rags. Her little hands were almost frozen with the cold. Ah! perhaps a burning reprint might be some good, if she could draw it from the bundle and strike it against the wall, just to warm her fingers. She drew one out—“scratch!” how it sputtered as it burnt! It gave a warm, bright light, like a little candle, as she held her hand over it. It was really a wonderful light. It seemed to the little girl that she was sitting by a large iron stove, with polished brass feet and a brass ornament. How the fire burned! and seemed so beautifully warm that the child stretched out her feet as if to warm them, when, lo! the flame of the reprint went out, the stove vanished, and she had only the remains of the half-burnt paper in her hand.
Hey Richard, swap you five copies of ‘Structural basis for the interaction between the Tap/NXF1 UBA domain and FG nucleoporins at 1 Å resolution’ for ten of Replication termination in Escherichia coli: structure and antihelicase activity of the Tus-Ter complex.
They are also good as a slightly eccentric wallpaper.
Ooh, ten seems a bit much. How about two?
Damn. You looked at the page count didn’t you? I’ve got three boxes of the ruddy things.
One for each decade of research?
No. Three boxes of reprints of that single paper, a total of about 12kg. Its actually the only paper I have physical reprints of.
Ah, the Little Microarray Girl. Somebody tell Rohn – I can see a crossover between LabLit and CHildrens’ fairy-tales.
Nuts to Rohn, that’s now mine.
Does the Little Microarray Girl dye at the end? I think she comes out in red and green spots (and all colours in between).
I can’t remember the end of The Little Microarray Girl. The Little Mermaid, however, is a damning indictment of what can go wrong if the price of human oocytes rises above that of caviar.
I think you might have that the wrong way round, Henry.
Ooh, walk up the aisle on sharp knives, you two!
Will you be my bridesmaid, Maxine?
(Which I think is a lovely name, by the way).
Ahem, getting back to the issue of reprints or printouts of papers in general. A few years ago I stopped keeping paper printouts from any paper – I discard them after reading and only keep the PDF. The wonderful program Papers (Macintosh only) is a big help in storing papers electronically (are they still papers if they are never printed out?).
Good philosophical question, Martin: although in some disciplines giving a talk or seminar is referred to as ‘presenting a paper’ so probably yes.
While Papers is a lovely program, and I’m glad you’ve found a solution, it doesn’t help me with my boxes (and look! Here are some from 1995!!)
Discard them. Or do you also keep your computer from 1995?
The computer is still functional…
Well, it was until we moved to Australia. Then I scrapped it. Still have the HD and RAM chips though.
So, uh, does anyone want a 16MB RAM chip? I’ll throw in
fivefifty free reprints with it.No. Three boxes of reprints of that single paper, a total of about 12kg. Its actually the only paper I have physical reprints of.
so that’s 4kg/box, say 100 reprints in each box, that’s 40 g/reprint, that’s . . .
pretty cheap paper, then.
(Absolutely nothing – say it again)
Martin,
Is there a version of ‘Papers’ for PC?
All my PDF’s (~1000) are stored in one folder and they’re all tagged so I’m reasonably organised. Back up copies but of course.
Just over a year ago, I was assisting in the dissemination of this
Manuscript.
The Journal editors would not let the Author have a PDF of her own work. I was sent about a dozen reprints which were due to be sent to the Dept. of Health, Health Protection Agency etc.
In the end, we scanned a copy and emailed copies instead.
This is the only time I have been in possession of glossy reprints and the irony is that they never left my home !! We were eventually sent the official PDF by the editors but were only allowed to email it to one researcher of their choice.
Better still, the Journal went Open last October, so the above link takes you directly to the downloadable PDF. I blogged about the Journal going Open and to my surprise got a pleasant comment from the Ed-in-Chief.
—
As to all of my 100’s of printed off PDF’s, thanks to this thread, they’re going off to be recycled.
No Richard, that can’t be right. If it were, mermaids would have fish heads and human legs and look like they’ve stepped out of a Hieronymous Bosch painting.
Graham, Papers is Macintosh only. I don’t know what PC users do to organize the PDFs on their computer. Maybe someone in the Papers group here on NN would know.
Last week I got the printed journal issue with my last paper in the mail. It feels nice to see your name on the title page, but after looking at it for a few weeks I will probably ditch it.
I saw a way of hacking iTunes to store PDFs instead of music (cross-platform). Only problem was that you couldn’t have two copies – one for music and one for PDFs – without a lot of serious mucking around. I got it working on the Mac but no idea if you could repeat the trick under Windows. Maybe look here for starters.
so that’s 4kg/box, say 100 reprints in each box, that’s 40 g/reprint, that’s . . .
pretty cheap paper, then
Well what can you expect with these substandard journals. From recollection it was 300 reprints total, not on cheap paper, so I suspect I have understimated the weight somewhat. But IIRC you couldn’t ask for no reprints from the journal at the time
What you’re saying, Cameron, is that Journals alone were responsible for climate change.
Is that shiny paper recyclable anyway?
Oh I don’t know. They are sitting in an office as a fairly effective carbon sequestration scheme I would have thought.
Heh. I’ve long thought that printing more books would help reduce CO2 load (as long as you replace the trees).
Maybe we should lobby the Journals to provide more reprints? We’d have to stop Martin from recycling them, though.
I appear to have a spare " ’ " in the bag.
‘R & B’ from Wales 2007.
I have something else: a huge drawer full of papers that the PhD student working on the project before me went through pains to get photocopied from the library stacks. I couldn’t get myself to throw them out, because there might be something in one of these papers that I want to look up while writing up, and I am sure as hell not going to the stacks and photocopying them all over again! So what I’m going to do at some point is figure out which of them have retroactively been made available online, and throw those out. Ugh, I bet they’re all online now. Who wants a huge pile of review papers about Ras signaling from the early nineties? They’re all different, and probably very interesting!
Are they covered in yellow highlighter pen?
Some of them are, but it has faded to that light greyish yellow.