Policies

A few important notes for readers of D&T.

Links to original journal articles

I mostly write about science on D&T, and I prefer to link to original, peer-reviewed research papers. Most scientific journals make their content available online these days, which is great; but many require personal or institutional subscriptions. To forewarn readers of what they'll get if they click a link on D&T, I append tags in square brackets, as follows:

• Links with no tags lead directly to original sources;
• Links with [$a] tags lead to journal or archive landing pages containing at least an abstract, but also a login link requiring a subscription or payment for the full article;
• Links with [$$] tags lead to journal or archive landing pages containing only a login/payment link; and
• Links with [PDF] tags lead to (potentially large) downloadable documents of the article in Adobe PDF format, which are often available from authors' personal websites.

Fortunately, Google Scholar has gotten pretty good at ferreting out freely-available PDF versions of articles–so I link to these whenever possible. But I do often want to discuss or cite results that are locked behind paywalls, and if you run into one of these, I suggest you access it via your nearest university library.

Social media

Please do follow me on Twitter, and feel free to add me as a contact on Flickr, if you're into that sort of thing. I am also quite active on a certain other social network, but I generally do not add contacts there whom I haven't met in person, so please don't take it personally if I don't respond to your friend request.

If you want to e-mail directly about something to do with D&T, there is an e-mail address for that. Please note that any correspondence to me concerning D&T, via any medium, may be quoted in whole or in part on the blog, and that you are understood to have agreed to this condition when you send your first message.

Comments

D&T doesn't attract a very great deal of comments, so I haven't had to put much thought into a moderation policy. I generally try to respond to what readers post, especially because comments are relatively rare and manageable. Comments on D&T are handled by Disqus, which allows readers to comment using their existing Twitter, Facebook, Yahoo!, or other OpenID credentials, and does some automated spam detection and containment. I delete all spam that slips through these measures, and I reserve the right to remove comments that are hateful, threatening, or disrespectful. These are subjective measures, but I hope that I've established what I consider appropriate in my own posting.