Our answers to your questions!

1. How do you choose which scientific papers to cover?
2. What do you mean by “Open Access”?
3. How do you decide who to put as the “contact” for the scientific paper?
4. What makes you qualified to do this?
5. I’m a journalist assigned to cover a certain topic. Can you help me with it?
6. I’m a scientist. Will you feature my recent paper?
7. How often do you post?
8. Can I use your title/text for my assignment?
9. Are you biased? How?
10. Who is funding TL;DResearch?

How do you choose which scientific papers to cover?

The same simple way we’ve been picking which papers to read for years: we follow our curiosity! We choose papers that look interesting to us, not that we believe will/should be interesting to you – though we do hope that you’ll find something intriguing about it, too. Really the only hard and fast criterion we use is that the article must be published and available as Open Access.

What do you mean by “Open Access”?

“Open Access” is a term we use to describe a paper that can be downloaded for free directly from the publisher. This means the article is not behind a paywall, and anyone can access it for free. Note that we also provide a copy of the paper as a PDF on this site, for free downloading.

How do you decide who to put as the “contact” for the scientific paper?

We recommend one of the authors on the paper as a person to contact for further insight, and our pick is meant to highlight a more junior scientist that was involved, who can provide you with a contemporary take, and also benefit from exposure. Feel free to make contact with any of the authors if you have questions; you can find their affiliations on the paper itself.

What makes you qualified to do this?

Between the two of us, we’ve been reading several scientific papers per month for more than 40 years. We’ve watched in real time as the arguments for climate change progressed from suggestion, to hypothesis, to theory, to canon and we’ve changed our minds back and forth along the way. We’ve also seen the technologies that researchers use to study climate change develop exponentially, and finally landed in an informed place between optimism and skepticism.

I’m a journalist assigned to cover a certain topic. Can you help me with it?

Maybe! Please reach out to us using our Contact page.

I’m a scientist. Will you feature my recent paper?

Maybe! Please reach out to us using our Contact page.

How often do you post?

When we read something interesting, it finds its way onto the blog. There’s no set schedule as of right now. We try to keep up with what our colleagues are doing, and we’d like to help you keep up, too.

Can I use your title/text for my assignment?

Not word-for-word, as that counts as plagiarism and you can get in big trouble for it. Our posts are meant to help you decide if you want to download and read the source on your own. In the end, you’ll have to decide for yourself what you think of each new study.

Are you biased? How?

We are no more, or less, biased than any scientist doing active research in the field of environmental science. We were trained to be objective while examining data, and the data has convinced us that, overall, the earth is warming because of fossil fuel use.

Who is funding TL;DResearch?

Nobody, really. We paid for this wordpress site out of our own pockets. TL;DResearch is part of our overall mission as educators to welcome anyone and everyone into the broad field of science and its discoveries.