Imagine living in a world where it has to be explicitly said that you are allowed to send someone a free copy of something you wrote.
The research was paid for by someone. It is not unheard of for a company to offer a grant under the condition that they get the results, say, six months before the rest of the world.
This the the case for publically funded research as well. Scientific journals have paper submitted for free, papers reviewed for free, then they charge the $35/article fee to anyone who reads it, or more generally, they charge universities/etcs in the 5 to 6 figures sum/year for unlimited access.
Scientific journals are a billion dollar industry who do literally nothing for that money. They limit scientific progress to make money, and thats it.
Angry Elsevier noises intensify in the background...
"We work hard every day to stamp 'peer-reviewed' on ChatGPT botslop and collect money. It's a valuable service."
tbf the confusion is not so much that the author would be allowed to but that they'd want to. people would naturally assume that like with many things people put time into creating, such as novels and video games and whatever else, that the fee required to access it is desired by the author and in some way benefits them.
People shouldn't have to email you. Put your papers on arxiv.org or your own web site.
A number of journals actually have clauses around how you can't publish it anywhere else if they accept it.
So you can't 'publish' it in those places, but you can send it privately to people who ask.
People can ask me for it by sending a "GET" request to my web server using the HTTP protocol.
And then those can "leak" it :)
It seems like that could just about go in one's email signature:
"If this message has an attached published paper, please do me the service of making this publicly available via arxiv /scihub or other agency as I'm typically bound from doing this by the publishers conditions"
Boycott the journals! Both the readers and the researchers!
Damn Straight!
At least where I live the laws are such that publishers can claim copyrights only after they added their "editor" customizations such as publisher logos, page numbers, layout changes etc.
The manuscript that you/the scientist wrote and handed in to the publisher is free of that, the publisher cannot claim any rights at that state. So you always have the right to publish the "unedited" manuscript anywhere including researchgate, arxiv, your website etc.
Just so we’re clear, it’s not obvious nor is the general public misunderstanding anything. There are not a lot of situations like that with basically any other thing that has been monetized. I am a filmmaker. Even if I directed, produced, and starred in the film, I cannot necessarily send you a copy for free even if I want to (legally). There are other parties involved that restrict what I can and can’t do with the product, typically film festivals until the festival circuit is done and then distributors.
This is very common and most people just kind of assume It to be the case with academic journals.
Stop making excuses and send me that film you made. I know you want to do it.
Ha you don’t want to see my trash shooting
now I'm wondering if you think your filmmaking skills are bad or if your film involves you using firearms on garbage cans.
There are other parties involved that restrict what I can and can’t do
I'm going to guess it's got something to do with the high cost of creating the actual film reel that gives creditors the power to dictate access to the film as per a contract.
You see how that may be different yet?
It is different, but tbf academics are also reliant on external funding sources to conduct research. It's not absurd to think that the grant writers or university administration might have some stipulations about the free distribution of research they paid for.
Have we forgotten what happened to Aaron Swartz? With the state of the world today, I naturally expect everything to be monetized, regardless of whether it makes any rational or ethical sense.
To be fair though, the people who fund the research are not the people who lose out if the publisher isn't paid their £30. They are very often governmental or inter-governmental research agencies and programmes. Realistically it is rare for anyone except from the publisher to care about free distribution. The publishers are however pretty vicious (e.g. Swartz's case).
Scientist here. I encourage everyone to use a shadow library like Scihub to break the stranglehold that Elsevier and Wiley have on the free availability of knowledge. These are financialized corporations that add nothing to society and leach off of scientists' hard work.
Why scientists HAVE to publish on those platforms rather than some other reasonable alternative?
Why scientists HAVE to pay to publish on those platforms rather than some other reasonable alternative?
I work as a non-academic at a research university.
Let me tell you, academics love discussing and sharing every phase of their papers, especially the findings and subsequent theories or discoveries. I get to participate in research activities quite frequently and some of it is so fascinating. They love someone showing interest and love sharing on their knowledge and findings. There's a couple I'll be waiting months more to hear conclusions on, but it's that "so cool if true" stuff. I can't imagine the anticipation of those involved, but even if they hit a wall, they explain they're still just as excited to know they've closed the door on something and may open the door to something else.
It seems like such rewarding work.
There's also a stigma around journals the older and more experienced academics get. I won't get into it, but yeah, all good things are open to exploitation and often the younger ones are held under wings to guide them on the right path for quicker career growth. That's just how it eventually works with humans for any thing that's meant to be of best intentions.
But most people are good people and their passion is untameable, so all you need is just ask them to share knowledge—they absolutely will. The vast majority are certainly not in it for the money, not unless it can get them more financing for more research lol.
You're not wrong, but it's not good enough to simply make it available somehow today, you want it publicly searchable.
That 'just email us' is a significant piece of friction in the way of scientific freedom of enquiry. Look to arxiv or equivalents...
Scihub ftw! 🏴☠️
You could drop the pirate flag because this isnt even piracy
Honestly I’ve heard this and seen it written very many times, but any time I’ve ever reached out to a lead author to request access to their paper I’ve been met with zero reply. Like, nothing, from at least six different attempts (that I can remember right now). And I’m a government employee emailing from a government domain, usually with a very well written plea for information. Maybe I’m the unlucky one?
Oh, government email domain would scare anyone off. It's as bad as a "fbi.com" address. I doubt the permission is really there as the post says, what I have seen is the contrary. Anyway, try with a regular email address. If you want, as background story, say you're a student in a third-world country. That's how I lived before Sci-Hub (via VPN) and it worked out most of the time (e.g. ~75% success rate).
Thanks for the advice - I’ll definitely take that into account! To be clear (without doxxing myself) my emails came from a ‘.nsw.gov.au’ address so I hope that wouldn’t steer many academics away from sharing their findings, especially those whose research was conducted in other Anglophonic countries (specifically the US and Canada). I can understand the hint of hesitation though. I always assumed using my .gov.au email would have evaded spam filters, but perhaps my regular email address might have more luck.
I should also state that the research I’ve been trying to access is predominately psychological or social work academia (I’m a child protection caseworker), and I’m not sure if the same “share it if you got it” mantra applies in those fields.
Professors these days are extremely overworked - it's possible it simply got lost, plus it's not their business to provide a copy, especially for someone they think might be able to get one via their own means. Anyway you are right: it doesn't always work.:-)
Try contacting the non-lead authors (even if the article says "contact email"; usually the journal insists you pick one, but the others are also free to send you the article.)
When I was in academia, my inbox was like 40% emails like "publish your next article here", " you are invited to conference x", "your article on x". You get a lot of spam that is generated with text snippets from your work, so it is very targeted. You just have to start ignoring most emails. The other 60% is just work convos from known sources, so it is very easy to separate the two. Or kind of... you could still get an invitation or a review request, but you sort of know peoples names and names of joirnals. I guess its just hard to get by this.
When I went to university, our lecturer would literally pass around a flash drive with the ridiculously overpriced textbook he was the author of. He was a cool guy who had the extremely valuable skill of turning a dull subject interesting.
I had one of those myself! Free full-text PDF for anyone who was registered for the course. That’s the way that a true academic who loves the dissemination of their research operates. He was so engaging and invigorating too; he exemplified the archetype of the ‘I don’t care if you don’t care; I’m gonna make you care’ professor.
When I had a class where the text that was written by the professor was mandatory reading and they demanded buying the newest version (she made a new version every year to keep sales up) I specifically pirated her book to just barely pass the class and move on from it. Fuck anyone who hides their knowledge from those who want to learn.
What I don't understand, and maybe somebody can explain. If this is the case, why wouldn't there be torrents of every paper whose authors would be genuinely delighted to share?
Not being skeptical here. I'm really curious.
And maybe there are, and they're just not well advertised for understandable reasons?
Sci-Hub was the most similar exploitation of such "situation"
Yes, this is how I made it through grad school lol. Wish I knew as an undergrad, but that's fine.
There are a whole bunch of people who might be scientists who are not in academia.
Until now I could get by with Scihub and Arxiv for college and personal hyperfixation research, but I'd actually love to ask an author directly some time if I ever run into a paper where that's necessary.
Ive had mixed results with this, but one author was really excited (as was i) and we had a good back and forth for a bit after i had a chance to read/digest the paper.
By the way, in almost 100% of cases (the rest being just OA where the published version could be sent by anyone to anyone or something legally really dubious), the authors have a right to send their paper, even if it is published in a paywalled journal. Basically, the only thing the journal has a right to for subscription-based (aka those that cost $35) articles is content plus page layout. If the authors have the exact same text but formatted differently, they are free to distribute it wherever and however they want.
Preprint servers or lab/personal websites are best first choices for that.
edit: a small disclaimer on the exact same text meaning exact same text the authors provided; if the editor in the journal has corrected some typos and inserted a/the here or there (a common thing for non-natives to miss), then this becomes more of a grey area, because technically at this point it’s not a 100% authors’ text).
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