Pheasants Forever concentrates on saving and creating wildlife habitat, and as a member of the McPherson Area Pheasants Forever Executive Committee, Brett Reber envisioned a plot of land on which habitat enhancement techniques could be showcased for area farmers and ranchers to see.

Reber approached the committee with his vision and a deal was struck with the former NCRA Refinery to lease a plot of land west of McPherson for the project. When the man farming the land heard about the agreement, he insisted they had been given some of his best and most accessible ground, and suggested they use a parcel further up the road that was poorer farm ground. Reber said it was disheartening at the time because that 46 acres of land contained an old dilapidated farmstead, and as a whole needed lots of work and cleanup.

Several of the committee members including Reber had read the book by Kansas native and KU graduate Richard Louv called Last Child in the Woods; Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder, a narrative about the broken relationship between today’s youth and nature. As they surveyed that gnarly but more nature-rich plot of land and considered its potential for true outdoor nature interaction, they sensed their mission should focus more on educating youth, so in 2008 the McPherson Uplands Outdoor Life Center was born with the mission “To create a place for McPherson County and Kansas youth to learn and develop outdoor skills and an appreciation for wildlife and natural conservation.”

The front part of the property was a big open field, and the rest of the parcel lay on the other side of a tree row and was surrounded on one end by a wooded area and a creek. That portion contained the tumble-down old farmstead and was a drainage nightmare. The first order of business was to tear down the house, the huge barn and the buildings and to clean up the years of accumulated trash and junk around them. Next, two ponds were built at two different levels to solve the drainage dilemma. Nature trails were developed that meander through the woods and along the creek, and the open fields were seeded to native grasses. A metal round top building was erected at the parking area for equipment storage and as a shelter from inclement weather.

The McPherson Area Pheasants Forever Chapter remains the principal financial supporter of the center. The building, mowing and maintenance equipment, and labor to build the ponds, the trails and the shooting range were all donated. Benches along the trails, wood duck and floating goose nesting boxes, native grass & wildflower plantings and the new geo-caching course were all constructed by boy scouts as Eagle Scout projects. Check out their website at www.mcphersonvalleyuplands.org for a list of upcoming summer events. Of special interest is a summer program called “Third Thursday” when there are FREE youth shooting clinics held the third Thursdays of June, July and August, coached by KS Wildlife and Parks and Pheasants Forever members.

What once was 46 acres that knew nothing but endless years of poor wheat crops and erosion and was nearly devoid of wildlife, has been transformed into a wonderful, primitive, outdoor classroom teeming with songbirds, pheasants, quail and deer. Reber told me “It is truly a testament to the statement if you build it, they will come; if you create habitat, you’ll get wildlife.”…Continue to Explore Kansas Outdoors!

Steve Gilliland, Inman, can be contacted by email at [email protected].

A recent announcement by the European Commission calls for all research to be freely available online by 2020, a system called “open access.” This action threatens to undermine science research.

In addition, the work of a young graduate student in Kazakhstan has essentially accomplished “open access” by pirating huge collections of science papers and even books and placing them online free. Alexandra Elbakyan, apparently a brilliant computer programmer, has developed programs that steal academic papers from university websites, journal publishers and subscription service aggregators such as JSTOR, ebrary and Project MUSE.

This online piracy extends to scholarly books, as detailed in the April 22, 2016 issue of Chronicle of Higher Education. University presses affected and the number of titles pirated include: Cornell University Press (500 titles pirated), Johns Hopkins University Press (800), Harvard University Press (2,000) and Oxford University Press (over 17,000 titles stolen). The books are made free through the website Library Genesis while the scientific articles that number in the millions are on Sci-Hub.

Sadly, online surveys of scientists, including authors of these pirated articles, indicate widespread approval of this piracy. Analysis of where the most people are downloading these stolen articles indicate highest usage in: the Middle East, India, China, Russia, the United States, Brazil, and Europe.

According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, “Both sites were ordered shut down last year as a result of a lawsuit filed by a commercial journal publisher, Elsevier.” In response, Sci-Hub and Library Genesis merely switch to slightly different web addresses.

It is easy to be sympathetic to Ms. Elbakyan and her amazing success. A rationale posted on both sites “argues that the information in the articles and books should be free from commercial restraints” according to the Chronicle of Higher Education. This is the same argument that a group called SPARC has been making for decades, although they have worked for open access through legal channels. In addition, U.S. agencies have already required that federally funded research be made available free upon publication.

However, there are two major problems with open access that threaten the very core of the science enterprise: the dismantling of professional societies and the loss of a permanent science record.

The first threat is best described in a commentary sent to the New York Times by Gordon Nelson, President of the Council of Scientific Society Presidents in February 28, 2013. “A significant fraction of the scientific literature is published by nonprofit societies. Publications often represent an important core activity of those societies. Their pricing is a fraction of that of for-profit publishers. To mount a journal is not free. It requires hardware, software, management of the peer review process, editorial work (editors are often paid), maintenance of the database over decades, and printing the product…. If the new policy [open access] is implemented without consideration of the scientific societies, there could be serious damage to both science and science education.”

The second threat is the lack of a permanent archive when there is no paper copy in libraries. Despite the enthusiasm of digital idiots entrenched in academia, the life of online materials is very short. Just as we have made the change from VHS to CDs and are moving on to cloud-based services, most hardware and software becomes obsolescent in less than a decade.

Google executive Vint Cerf, co-inventor of the protocols that make the Internet work, warns of a digital “dark age” due to “bit rot” or the continuous loss of our ability to read materials barely a decade old. We are continually “migrating” our media files to new formats in time periods of less than ten years. He describes the need to “take an X-ray snapshot of the content and the operating system together, with a description of the machine it runs on, and preserve that for long periods of time.”

Teckkies are like teenagers who think their technology is immortal. But grown-ups can stop to ask, where are our files we made on MS-DOS? The cost of continually “migrating up” a science journal to new hardware and software formats rapidly exceeds the cost of having a paper copy in a library. A paper book or journal on acid-free paper lasts for at least 500 years, and you then copy it again on new acid-free paper.

Cerf reportedly told The Guardian newspaper, “If there are photos you really care about, print them off.” The same should be said for science research.